NERMIN SAYBASILI
Department of Visual Cultures
Goldsmiths College, London and
Department of Art History
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Istanbul

The paper will intend to find a way to contact the dynamic, emergent, geographically and temporarily fluctuating pattern of presences. I will try to examine the spectral densities in networked cities as the result of the endless flux of migration, in reference to cyberspace and digital geographies generated by satellite technologies to track down the migratory movements in the land.

The paper is concerned with spectrality. This preoccupation will facilitate a re-thinking of the issue of migration in the age of globalism. In the global world realities are challenged and caused to waver visibly, yet also invisibly. When we say ‘barely perceptible’, we want to mean by that both ‘perceptible’ and ‘imperceptible’ at once. Throughout the discussion, I will refer to ‘Search’ (2005), a video-documentary by Yilmaz Ozdil and to ‘Writing Desire’ (2000) and ‘Remote Sensing’ (2001), the video-works by Ursula Biemann.

In Spectre of Marx (1994) Derrida has asked: ‘What is the effectivity or the presence of a spectre, that is of what seems to remain as ineffective, virtual, insubstantial as a simulacrum?’ (Derrida 1994: 10) To think through the logic of the ‘ghost’ is to point toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic, the logic that opposes the past to the present, the living to the non-living, the presence to the absence, the visible to the invisible, the near to the far, the actuality to the potentiality.In the context of the discussion, the ‘ghost’ emerges as a link whose uncontrollable and unpredictable apparitions occur both in real and virtual space, both in street and cyberspace. It produces material affects.

‘Search’, a film on refugees who are ‘illegally’ living in Van (a city at the geographical edge of Turkey) and ‘contact’ the world by going to the internet-cafés, shows us that a new mode of diasporic subjectivity occurs on the Net. I am concerned with cyberspace as ‘a lived space’ that produces webs of interconnectedness. Biemann’s two video-essays, which the artist attempt to uncover the close link between global networking (especially the Internet) and women trafficking in the global sex industry, map out the highly patterned and structured cross-border circuits of women that activate a zone of ‘counter-geography’ where women eventually inscribe themselves into the physical terrain at the fringe of society. In these spaces women gain ‘presence’, they emerge as subjects, but without gaining power. Powerlessness, Sassen has indicated, is not a silence at bottom; its absence is present and has consequences. The places of absence, of silence are constituted in the logic of inter-connectedness and complexities.