Pages for the book made during the event :

BACK TO THE CORE

In May 2007, artists and writers were invited to come together for one weekend, to produce pages for an in-situ publication at Platform Garanti centre for contemporary art, Istanbul.

In 1911, teenagers who were to become the Surrealist group, took inspiration from the pulp novels of super criminal, ‘Fantômas’ a serialized novel by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre. Again in the 1950s Fantômas became an inspiration to the young filmmakers and critics Franju, Trufaut, Godard and Rivette at the Cinémathèque Français in Paris, watching Louis Feuillade’s Film version.

Now, nearly one hundred years later we invited artists and writers to make new engagements with this source. Over the weekend there were reading performances of the first Turkish edition Fantômas books by invited guests; artist collective Hazavuzu, Körkan Ergun and Orhan Cem Çetin. A continuous projection of the Fantômas silent movie series played throughout. This became the backdrop to the production of new instant work, which is now published as a collective photocopy booklet and distributed at key venues in istanbul and London. Back to the Core is a critical artistic reflection on the re-emergence of culture across time, of origin and death, history and memory. A major and recurrent theme of cinema criticism is that film lies dead in the archive, only to live when clicking through the projector gate. Cinema is dead, and like a zombie, it re emerges in different eras, living once more for an hour or so.Culture too re-emerges in cycles, origins are disguised or removed from memory, re presented by new originators. Back to the Core is not a project about looking backwards, but of bringing history forwards, of being in the presence of history, and perhaps even ignoring it. Fantômas is our muse for the weekend, a weekend with its own sense of time.

Fantômas is everyone and no one, he is everywhere and nowhere.

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Emre Sansar Deger