this year I have learned:

 

 that

becoming American takes about 12 years.

 

that

leaving New York isn’t easy.

 

that

it's easier to leave than to be left behind.

 

that

there is a wood shop close by MoMA PS1.

 

that

the ceiling of MoMA PS1’s basement is very low.

 

that

WT Papier is coated with SunChemical white offset ink.

 

that

just before the final countdown begins, the Danish national television broadcasts a black and white German short film called Dinner For One.

 

that

watching Vito Acconci’s Openings makes me very uncomfortable. The camera focuses on his stomach as he pulls out his body hair, until he is hairless.

 

that

being in the same room with Jonas Mekas is magical.

 

that

I have to write and record everyday.

 

that I

 have to write and edit my version of the calendar everyday.

 

that

in 1974 Danny Lyon went to Columbia to make a film about homeless children living on the streets. It is called Los Ninos Abandonados.

 

that

Cameraperson is a film by Kirsten Johnson which confronts the nature of seeing, being present, and dealing with memory and trauma.

 

that

dispossession means the action of depriving someone of land, property, or other possessions.

 

that

my desk at the garden room is the second most unwanted.

 

that

rumination means that you continuously think about the various aspects of situations that are upsetting.

 

that

there are 75 living plants in Werkplaats.

 

that

missing the first three weeks of school is not very nice.

 

that

there is something mysteriously hidden in school.

 

that

there is a space called John Cage in school.

 

that

I have limitations.

 

that

I have shortcomings.

 

that

memory can be fiction.

 

that

memory can be fact.

 

that

Rome wasn’t built in one day.

 

 that

my new apartment in Arnhem is located on top of a fried chicken shop.

 

that

my new life is free of old restrictions.

 

that

my new apartment is too big for me.

 

that

it is not possible to find good avocados in the Netherlands.

 

that

it is not possible to be in two places at once.

 

that

it rains in Arnhem even when it doesn't rain.

 

that

I can cook Turkish lentil soup for 18 people.

 

that

Friday lunch team is the best.

 

that

Eloise is into Halloween as much as I am.

 

that

I have a big mouth.

that

sometimes I get very dark.

 

that

Rotterdam is beautiful and jenever makes you hug people.

 

 that

I have troubling ideas about home.

 

that

I am interested in home, distance and yearning.

 

that

I feel foreign in my home town.

 

that

my work is about dislocation, memory, trauma, translation, time, collective memory and spoken word.

 

that

my work is also about

cultural heritage.

 

that

there are days I don’t speak Turkish at all.

 

that

there are days I can’t speak Turkish at all.

 

that

there are days I am afraid of forgetting Turkish.

 

that

there are days I react to sudden pain in English.  instead of "ah!", I say "ouch"

 

that

a prototype is the bridge between one and infinite.

 

that

I can make a garden with using wild weeds that only grow in Turkey.

 

that

every cultivated flower is the descendant of a wild one.

 

that

I lost my mother tongue.

 

that

I am interested in emotional truth.

 

that

I have trust issues.

 

that

I am interested in dislocation and what it does to people.

 

that

turning thirty five is a disorienting experience.

 

that

there is a Turkish poem about turning thirty five.

 

that

I am reminded of my age almost everyday.

 

that

Gertrude Stein thinks we are always the same age inside.

 

that

she offered to translate George Hugnet's poem called Enfance for him but instead she wrote a poem about it. This first pleased Hugnet too much and then did not please him at all.

 

that

New York haunts me.

 

that

I can fail.

 

that

I might miss the boat.

 

that

I love repetition.

 

that

I love the action of

doing the same thing over and over again.

 

that

Currency is a magazine edited by Sico Carlier.

 

that

I was given the second issue to experiment with for WT Papier.

 

that

in Currency 2;  Didier Lestrade interviewed John Waters about murders, trials, Divine, money, electric chairs, Baltimore, Edith Massey, Odorama, car accidents, eating no more shit.

 

that

Lestrade thinks John Waters is the craziest director of his kind.

 

that

I love disassembling design, imagining the beginnings of publications.

 

that

we can invite Sico Carlier for a living room session.

 

that

loose associations is a thought disorder.

 

that

I love LA.

 

that

I can live in LA.

 

that

United States of America selected the most awful president of its history.

 

that

asterisk means “little star” in Greek.

 

that

in computer science, the asterisk is commonly used as a wildcard character, or to denote pointers, repetition, or multiplication.

 

that

The original asterisk shape was seven-armed, each arm like a teardrop shooting from the center.

 

that

I am interested in memoirs as work.

 

that

I believe that feelings are facts.

 

that

I believe in Yvonne Rainer.

 

that

imagination and design never really align.

 

that

in Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, women are simple line-segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of sides.

 

that

walking is a strange gesture in Los Angeles.

 

that

protesting against Trump feels amazing.

 

that

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's second film is about a movie director, going back to his hometown to make a movie using a cast of local people. It is called Boredom of May, but was translated as Clouds of May.

 

that

Theaster Gates had a solo show in Regen Projects. It was called But To Be A Poor Race.

 

that

there are about 53 bookstores in Los Angeles.

 

that

once a person is misplaced they become immediately vulnerable.

 

that

ASCII is abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

 

that

most of the time my work is about underlining or highlighting other people’s work.

 

that

I like finding the common denominator.

 

that

I love working with sound.

 

that

footnotes are as important as the main text and deserve more attention in general.

 

that

there is a thrift store in LA that offers HIV Testing.

 

that

 Trisha Brown died.

 

that

one of the ongoing metaphors in Trisha Brown’s MG: The Movie was time; not metered time or measured time but stranger notions like the volume of time, past time, time peeling away.

 

that

in order to become a group, each person must give up little pieces of themselves.

 

that

the present perfect is a grammatical combination of the present tense and the perfect aspect that is used to express a past event that has present consequences.

 

that

Quad is a television play by Samuel Beckett, written and first produced and broadcast in 1981, the year I was born. It is a brief, wordless exercise in movement and geometry.

 

that

small towns in north France feel like the end of the world.

 

that

everything tastes better in France.

 

that

Kendrick Lamar sounds better in France.

 

that

Paris is terminally beautiful.

 

that

Turkey said yes to

dictatorship.

 

that

people laugh at you when you say you are feminist in Turkey.

 

that

 there are still street cats, dogs and children everywhere in Turkey.

 

that

no one complains about hearing the same prayer five times a day, everyday in Turkey.

 

that

there are lots of things under the carpets in Turkey.

 

that

there are lots elephants in the rooms in Turkey.

 

that

personal space does not exist in Turkey.

 

that

places change when someone leaves them.

 

that

I feel shame when I speak Turkish in Arnhem.

 

that

I am interested in Turkish rituals, traditions, archetypes, and anomalies.

 

that

if I can understand Turkish tradition, maybe I can go back home again.

 

that

there is a Turkish expression that reads: A person who is separated from their lover cries for seven years, but the person who is separated from their home cries till they die.

 

that

in the Ottoman Empire belly dance was performed by both boys and women in the Sultan's palace.

 

that

during the 80’s turkish actor Masist Gül made a series of six comic books by hand with the title Pavement Myth–The Life of the Pavement’s Wolf. The story takes place between 1905 and 1978. It is written in Turkish and is impossible to translate without significant loss of meaning as he wrote everything in rhyme, using the language in a highly personal way.

 

 that

Jodorowsky's latest film, The Dance of Reality is a magic-realist memoir of the director's own childhood, filled with iguanas, circus clowns and amputees. He shot most of the action in his hometown of Tocopilla.

 

that

a will-o'-the-wisp is an atmospheric ghost light seen by travelers at night, especially over bogs, swamps, or marshes.

 

that

the movie Un chant d'amour by Jean Genet has no conversation.

 

that

Chris Kraus' writing is magic.

 

that

Simone Veil is the first radical philosopher of sadness.

 

that

she said “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

 

that

Nabokov said “My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom.”

 

that

Agnès Varda said: “I am putting together elements that touch your memory of your own life. I want people to get back to themselves; I don’t want to impose anything.”

 

that

the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966 were large-scale killings  occurred over many months, targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists.

 

that

there are lots of things swept under the carpet in Indonesia.

 

that

Bruno Munari designed a fountain in 1954 and it was erected in front of the Book Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Exhibition.

 

that

Auriane and I are making a door bell.

 

that

the WT will soon have a new door bell.

 

 that

WT doorbell is becoming a platform.

 

that

reversing the fundamental function of an object is forever exciting.

 

that

A civil defense siren is a siren used to provide emergency warning of approaching danger and sometimes when the danger has passed.

 

that

the bell is confronting, magic making.

 

that

the bell is scandalous.

 

that

the bell is the the very act of hearing.