Vasiyetimdir: Vasiyetimindir.

[things could designate themselves on their own]

A commentary on the last wish (The first and last humanoids, for Hoarders). Clause 539. – If the legator cannot make an official or a handwritten will in an emergency, as in the cases of death threats, the loss of communication, illnesses, and wars, then she could prepare a will orally. The will takes away the agency from things and confer it to the collector. If an agency were to be ascribed to things, what would it be for a thing to have a will? Hoarders store. What the hoarders hoard is an extension of their bodies. Dopamine reward mechanism. When the things that hoarders accumulate on demand from others, those things become more desirable. You cannot spare it – they cannot be spared. Hoarders settle onto the host cell. (When the world comes to an end) all the things that are possessed will be possessed. Recreating human relations within the relation of things. Doomsday preppers hoard things so that they would suffocate themselves with things. The is not an eternal future, an instantaneous illusion of experience. Doomsday theories. Nuncupative will. If the voice recording is preserved, this is the affirmation of the non-existent thing ontologically, its occupying space only ontologically. Voices remained, things did not remain. Parasites eat away the energy of things. Let things lose their function and dwell on the host cell noodling around. What is it there? All the things that are borrowed from me should be reclaimed, the consumption praxes of hoarders and the dopamine stimulus of possessing something, the desire of collecting objects is part of new synaptic currents, in which the psycho-active, compulsive habits in the brain are ingrained.

Efe Murad studied philosophy at Princeton and is working towards his Ph.D. in Ottoman History and Arabic Philosophy and Theology at Harvard. He has published five books of poetry and five books of translations from the Iranian poets M. Azad and Fereydoon-e Moshiri and from the American poets C.K. Williams, Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian in Turkish. Together with Sidney Wade, he prepared a selection from the œuvre of Turkish poet Melih Cevdet Anday (Talisman Press, 2017). His poems, writings and translations in English have appeared in a wide range of journals such as Guernica, Jacket, Five Points, and The American Reader, and exhibitions including the 13th Istanbul Biennial.  He is currently working on the complete Turkish translation of Ezra Pound’s Cantos.

Vasiyetimdir* is a publication project that aims to explore how art works will subsist over long periods of time. Art works live in artist studios, private collections, museums, storage spaces, or simply in memories. But how far do the artists want to control what happens to their works when they are no longer? How do they want to exert their control? We directed these questions to the artists we are in dialogue with. We are accumulating their answers through m-est.org.

*Vasiyetimdir is a Turkish phrase that can roughly be translated into English as “It is my will that…” The phrase holds a tint of the melodramatic, mixed with a sentimental flair.

Vasiyetimdir was conceived by Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Özge Ersoy, and Merve Ünsal.