Therapeutic forgetting, agonistic remembrance: Conflicting memories of Izmir’s Kültürpark and contested narratives in contemporary Turkey

Abstract

This article proposes to read the history of Izmir’s Kültürpark as symptomatic of Turkey’s troubled relationship with its political past and urban heritage. Combining insights from political theory, urban and architectural history, and memory studies for a transdisciplinary analysis, it problematizes the oblivion surrounding Kültürpark and explores the ways in which this collective amnesia is questioned by contemporary artists and civic initiatives. First, we examine how Kültürpark rose on a foundation of forgetting of the uprooting of Izmir’s non-Muslim communities from their homeland and the disappearance of their cultural traces from collective memory. Second, we explore how contemporary artistic and civic interventions that engage with the themes of remembrance and coming to terms with the past contest highly selective memory constructs. Third, we raise the question of whether the agonistic debates on the national narratives about the past might open up a new memoryscape and signal a relatively late ‘memory turn’ in Turkey. Finally, we argue that these artistic and civic interventions might shed new light on the theoretical disputes in memory studies, in particular on the debates about cosmopolitan and agonistic modes of remembering. More specifically, we suggest that the recent memory turn Turkey has been experiencing demonstrates that these two modes of remembering are not mutually exclusive.