this is a continuation of an earlier interview
ArchivingtheCity: I’m talking to people about their practice; people who I think of loosely as having any kind of archival practice, and who are connected to or interested in the experience of living in cities. I want to find out about their “process.” So we can talk about some your projects that I saw on your website—
Hakan Topal: Do you want me to talk about the collective first, a little bit?
A: Sure!
H: We started this collective when I first moved to New York, from Ankara. I had a very close friend and we were doing these projects together, traveling to different sites in Turkey doing photography. And I collaborated with him on multiple projects prior to the collective. Actually, he was my kind of mentor, my professor, at one point. And so when I moved to New York, we were discussing and exchanging things online, and then we said why don’t we establish a kind of a platform to work together? You know, like very loosely? Then [at the same time] things in Turkey started to happen, like it always happens, but for us it was a kind of turning point. One of them was the 1999 earthquake. I feel lots of similarities between [the earthquake and] what happened in New Orleans with [Hurricane] Katrina. It betrayed the very condition of the state apparatus. Although the state collects all this money, and claims that it provides security for people, when the time comes that people really need help, the state is not there.
