Arteles Catalogue 2023-2020

Silence Awareness Existence program / JANUARY 2020
Asli Sonceley
Turkey / USA
www.aslisonceley.com
About
My work is in reaction to climate change and to review
my identity as a first generation immigrant. I am currently
investigating the links between mental health and
planet’s health via artistic compulsions vs chosen form of
communications.
Solastalgic Diaries
I came to Arteles for the silence. To listen to my body and to
the forest’s body. To mold my climate anxiety into something
serviceable.
In the forest I felt sheltered from the news and the noise. But
when weeks passed with a nervous long wait for the snow, I
heard climate change roar louder than before. Clarity set in.
Out of fragmented strains of essays, poetry and audiovisual
pieces, I began to form a coherent narrative: My Solastalgic
Diaries*.
Earth is a body in distress.
She is sending messages, captured as data, reaching human
minds in familiar formats: text, images, news. But our content
feed is condensed. Her voice becomes diluted.
If we ignore her cues, Earth will us feel them in our bodies.
Growing evidence links environmental damage to pandemics.
Modern society can be vaccinated. We are however intensely
vulnerable to widespread mental disorder. Because we no
longer speak Her language. We have forgotten our mother
tongue.
The spiritually turbulent artist archetype plays a rational role
as patient zero. Her body receives the distress calls of the
Planet body. She becomes so riddled with psychic imbalance
that she must dance it off. Sing it off. Paint it off.
Artist is a translator. She alone can trap Earth’s abstract cues
into language. Solastalgic Diaries imagines the possibility of
speaking our mother tongue again. My
wish is to inspire emotional stamina and to restore healthy
intra-planetary dialogue.
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*Solastalgia: “A form of homesickness one gets when one is still at
home.” Glenn Albrecht. Resource discovered thanks to generous
artist Giulia Mattera.