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SECRETIONS

Secretions is an art installation made in the souk of the city in the turkish Kurdistan for the Mardin contemporary
art biennale. It is completed with Narration, an artist book.
Based on meetings with key-characters of the Syriac, Kurdish and Arab communities, the art work looks back
into different power rivalry systems of the thousand-year city to gather the ways of living, to « arrange » them
in a narrative form. Secretions unfolds and mixes the places, the secrets et the magics of differents elements
of the city, its architecture, its culture, its dayly life : days / nights, the deads / the livings, the visible / the invisible,
the silk road, the mirrors, Mesopotamia, Sexe, the door locks, the doors, the carpets, the mythologies, the pigeons,
the coq fights, the PKK guerilla, the scorpions eand the snakes, the public spaces.
Through its developpement, the installation includes the stories of the refugees communities that come into the
city (Yezidi, Kurdish-Iraqi), as a consequence of the conflicts in Syria (30 km) and Iraq (80 km).
The installation is setting the narratives in front of the workshop of a chamane-craftsman, in the public space of
the souk, the heart of the city. The chaman is its keeper, its teller, its interpreter.


Secretions, Installation, october 2014, contemporary art biennale, may 2015, Mardin
Institut Français de Turquie, Mardin Biennale.

© Thierry Payet