“The Book of the Sea Delta” 2023

5’30’’ video poem screened at “At Land & Sea: Topographical Imagination and the Moving Image” Istanbul Bilgi University. May 2023.

This short video cartographic poem follows formations of deltas to get closer and more intimate with the nature of feminist thinking. Two characters come together: Etel Adnan with her poem “The Book of the Sea"; and the satellite photographs of the Çukurova Delta, in Southern Anatolia. Deltas are places where rivers meet seas. Long-carried waters, slow down, meander, pour out, sediment, flourish, and give birth to new life forms. They are neither on land nor on sea. Unhabitable, wet, complex, dark. Adnan’s poem brings up feminist themes like reproduction, fluidity, planetary thinking, and thinking in deep time and space as well as emotional states of loving, worldly anxieties of Being, and dark hopes for the continuation of life on Earth. These follow the delineation of coastlines and water bodies similarly, embodied in texts, lines, and the sound of the video.

The procession of the poem as a voice-over is translated into English and Turkish subtitles. The words are coupled with the images of delta landscapes, where the eye follows the coastlines and wetlands of the Çukurova. Characters of the water, the delta, and the poem intertwine and come to be in flux.

Adnan’s book is a rare print found in the Harvard Fine Arts Library. The video shows the print of the poem written originally in the handwriting of Adnan, in Arabic, and translated into English.