Lacin Tutalar

“Sentimentality has a different use of affect. Implied by sentimentality, there's a disconnect from the lived reality of the body. (...) Electoral campaigns bypass the body’s lived reality, and instead focus on a fantasy of wealth. What the quake intervened with was this fixation with fantasy."

A Paternal Rhythm of 2023 Turkish Elections: Using Sentiment, Fantasy of Wealth & Heroic Kitsch

My proposed contribution to this workshop comes with a discussion of affects through election slogans on billboards at the wake of 2023 general elections in Turkey. The upcoming election has encouraged political parties to take up space anew on billboards, posters and flamas hanging down bridges, on streets and pavements. Of course, the election campaigns are never limited to visual sphere; however, I am interested in how desperate billboards aim to touch the voter audience by poking certain affects. Posts on the billboards use an eclectic mix of affects to wishfully emphasize freedoms, national unity, while their audience is swimming in a wide current of financial affects that colonize their future. Why do political campaigners hold a naive belief in their promise despite the disconnect between their policies and the actual population, I ask. For example, such billboard campaigning is targeting youth as first-time voters with more Internet and flawless bandwidth, or, they underline tribute to national sentiments against refugees with criminal prospects. This is an forming-up research, while the intense pre-elections period is still to come in the first half of 2023. My former research included an analysis of affective political sphere through street music, and now I problematize an affective political channel in billboard’s colonizing imagery: what is the value of using that frame for stale, unrealistic, unsound promises at a time of financial hardship, which tells a peculiar story of money and affect?

Bio:

Lacin is a cultural geographer with an interest in urban sound ecologies, rhythmanalysis, affect and politics of hearing; Received PhD (2020) in Geography from University of Kentucky with a study of street musicians in Istanbul's social and political soundscapes between 2013-2016; Recently published on ghostly soundscapes; and, This presentation is part of her newly-shaping research interest in monetary affects and the political channels we experience them.