SMRN monthly meeting of February 28, 2022: The Woman in the Coffee*
On February 28, 2022, SMRN had another warm meeting with a group of members including Sheila Petty, Pantea Karimi, Çigdem Borucu, Minoo Moallem, Nezih Erdogan, Lynn Marie Kirby, Laura Marks, Radek Przedpełski, Kalpana Subramanian, Somayeh Khakshoor, Mena El Shazly, and Manuel Piña.
During this meeting, Nezih Erdoğan gave his presentation titled “'I see a Woman with a Bird on her Arm', Tasseography and Coffee Mud as Screen Image.” He shared his video-in-progress which is a project in collaboration with Çiğdem Borucu. The project was being prepared to be shown at A Light Footprint in the Cosmos, the SMRN event series in June 2022. According to Nezih, the project is a short video that departs from the idea of exploring tasseography or tasseomancy, to be more specific Turkish coffee cup fortunetelling within the framework of the imaginal. The video shows multiple cross-dissolve transitions of coffee grounds that settled to the bottom of the cup. With each transition, the mud changes shape taking on new meanings. On the rich and multi-layered soundtrack, which is made by Çiğdem, along with the music, we also hear mesmerizing interpretations of the fortune-teller who is looking at the mud on the inner surface of the coffee cup and distinguishing meaningful figures from the abstract mud shapes (“I see a woman with a bird on her arm”). The poetic interpretations were made by Çiğdem as an actual practice of coffee-reading with some of the coffee cup images that Nezih had provided.
Nezih believes that the inner surface of the coffee cup serves as a canvas or a screen for viewing and interpretation. His main motivation to make this film has been his interest in the process of exchanging countless narratives “enfolded” in the coffee cup—as Laura Marks might call it—and he thinks that perhaps the fortune-teller here functions more like a lecturer of the early cinema explaining to the audience the images on the screen. Nezih and Çiğdem consider the images and their verbal interpretation in coffee fortune-telling as a shift from the sensible to the imaginal realm, and no less imaginal than cinema and music. During the presentation, Nezih explained how the aim of making their video was to raise these issues.
After the presentation a truly engaging discussion took place, and the participants gave insightful feedback and presented thought-provoking questions to Nezih. Many of the comments included inviting the makers to try a deeper layer of abstraction for different reasons. One of the qualities that made this discussion very powerful was that the comments were going in many different directions, yet one could feel that they were all connected at the core.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the second presenter, who was supposed to be Narjis Mirza, could not participate and therefore we had to end the meeting with only one presentation.
*This report has been prepared with the help of Nezih Erdoğan.
**To see the final work of Nezih and Çiğdem please check this link.
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