DETOURS WHILE SPEAKING OF MONSTERS imagines Lake Wan as a memory place, a vessel where biological residues rest alongside stories of people, of nature, and of mythical beings. The strange sedimentary formations inside the lake, scientifically referred to as microbialites1Microbialites are sedimentary structures formed through the interaction of microorganisms and minerals, preserving a record of both biological activity and environmental conditions. They are among the oldest evidence of life on Earth. , embody layers of trauma, accumulated violence, and the resistance(s) to it. The film speaks through the Mountain Mother, who has been watching over the landscape since time immemorial and has borne witness to countless atrocities committed on her very skin, the bare earth of this mountainous land surrounding Lake Wan. Her voice is composed of geological, seismic and submarine sounds. Her tongue predates human languages, and the film translates her through subtitles:
Blood flew in this land, right here, down to the lake.
From Mount Ararat, through River Zîlan,
from Mount Artos, down to Lake Wan.
Then in summer, the blood evaporated from Lake Wan,
and in winter it snowed down to Mount Sîpan.
And then in spring, it melted down to the lake again.
Trapped between the mountains, the blood never left the lake.
It never left the lake.
She tells the story of a lake monster, a mythical serpentine creature of tales, bearer of thunderbolts. “People of the land beyond came and slayed the monster”, she rumbles with a sinking sorrow, “but its heart never left the lake.” Covered in minerals, the heart solidified with the microbialites and kept growing.
With a desire to defy the erasures and manipulations of hegemonic historiographies, the Mountain Mother positions herself firmly by the side of the monster, and therefore by the side of the monsterified: the oppressed from the past and present, those deemed lesser beings by the powerful, whose necropolitical regimes desperately need to construct monsters to slay.
Her voice reverberates through trembling surfaces, beneath which historical, mythological, and personal fragments of the film cross paths. Sudden audiovisual interventions, much like the glitches of memory, interrupt and at the same time connect these fragments.
The remote position of the camera, in tension with the extremely magnified imagery, opens up spaces to reflect on distance and proximity of narration, and on questions of access. It also marks the position of the person who is filming, and maps limitations in a landscape that is shaped by patterns of oppression, military-police checks, and broken roads.
At last, it turns towards the darkness and zooms into its distorted pixels, scanning the shores until a voice is dug out. He shares the memory of a massacre he survived, one that bears a refusal to be dehumanised.
The memory closely resembles a local Kurdish tale I heard in my childhood, the tale of the monster and the thunder. A strange entanglement becomes apparent: that of lived experiences and the tales we carry, tales that run through our minds and bodies, as imprints of inherited histories. An obscured presence lingers through the pulsating noise, as the eyes adjust to the night.
