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Renovated Façades: Layers of Production, Effacement and Branding
Abstract
In April 2017, the Adana (Archaeology) Museum opened as the first installment of a museum complex planned at the site of a former textile factory. The former factory where the museum is now housed was originally established by Kozmas Aristedes. Following massacres and expulsions of non-Muslim residents, the factory was nationalized, and later privatized as part of neoliberal economic reforms. During its tenure as a state-run textile mill, the location was immortalized in the social imagination by one of its laborers: famed novelist Orhan Kemal. Kemal’s 1957 classic Watchman Murtaza depicted the lifeworlds of laborers in the factory and the violent consequences of egoistic chauvinism in the name of duty. This study offers a trans-textual reading of the museum site, examining patterns across shifts in management and design of the space and the broader socioeconomic and political forces with which they are entangled. My discussion of the factors surrounding the changes in factory management over time will be contextualized in terms of political economy, (forced) migration and majoritarian state policies. The thrust of this research points to broader patterns of effacement, revision, and branding across time(1907-2022). Combining visual, spatial and textual analysis, I ask, what might the Adana Museum site's layers reveal about the entanglement of capital and political power in the Turkish Republic? Visual analysis of the new museum complex indicates the perpetuation of century-old museological tropes, especially through enforcing didactic chronological spatial design and reinforcing binary categories through aesthetic mediation of exhibits. The creation and display of new objects like dioramas and mannequins for the new museum reflect the persistence of the location as a locus of production long after it ceased (physical) manufacturing operations. In my analysis, the factory/museum site can be understood as a stage on which the (perceived and/or actual) distinction between state and capital accumulation, in/visible subject-hood, and senses of (national) duty play out. Reading the multilayered aesthetics and affects of the Adana Museum with an attention to erasure, revision and the provision of capital provides a mode to examine the multiple histories held up by, through and despite its renovated façade.
Discipline
Anthropology
Archaeology
History
Literature
Geographic Area
Ottoman Empire
Turkey
Sub Area
None