Associate Members

Nazlı Cabadağ

© Tal Adler

CARMAH members’ portraits were captured in March 2017, on the ‘New55 PN’ – a new handmade instant film for large format, 4”x5” cameras. This film was launched through crowdfunding in 2014 as a reinvention of the discontinued, legendary ‘Type 55’ by Polaroid. Since the sixties, Polaroid’s unique ‘Type 55’ starred in many artists’ and professional photographers’ projects. ‘Type 55’ provided both an instant print and a superb negative from which more (and larger) prints could be made. Like so many photographic material in the last 10-15 years, ‘Type 55’ was discontinued in 2009. Tal Adler decided to use the ‘New55 PN’ not only for its beautiful quality but also to reflect, and participate in, the revival of (photographic) heritage.

I joined CARMAH in April 2017 as a doctoral fellow in the  “Media and Mediation”  research group of the project Making Differences in Berlin: Transforming Museums and Heritage in the 21st century. Situated against the backdrop of new wave migration from Turkey to Germany, which arguably escalated due to the crackdown on dissidents within last five years, and against the entangled histories of migration between two countries, my ethnographic study explores the politics of transnational and translocal queer solidarity and practices of queering heritage across borders and generations. Over the course of two-year long fieldwork, I followed various solidarity events organized and/or attended by Turkish-speaking queer newcomers in Berlin. Engaged in dialogue with postcolonial queer critique, migration and diaspora studies and the literature on social movements, I tackle the politics and affects negotiated around translocality, activism and the political.

Before I hopped on CARMAH boat, I completed my MA in 2016 in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University with a thesis entitled “Negotiating Queer Public Visibility: Experiences of LGBTI Residents in Kurtuluş, İstanbul”