This work is dedicated to Osman Kavala.

 Past, in Each of its Moments Be Citable is a long-term artistic research project by E. İolanda Patrizia Bach Ruscello.

For over a decade, the artist has been wandering through Istanbul – the city she loves.

She is guided by old family photographs found on the carts of street vendors, and by Walter Benjamin's text On the Concept of History – which she reads as an artistic manifesto for how history should be written. At every moment.

Both approaches are rooted in Ruscello's earlier projects: since 2012, İolanda has been intensively engaged with Walter Benjamin's script-images, publishing several works on the subject.

Her devotion to amateur photographs, which she frames – in a Benjaminian sense – as the trash of history, reaches further back: early encounters in her teenage years with these images, so carelessly scattered and discarded on flea market floors, gave rise to a collection of, at this point, around one million photographs, which the artist works on both collaboratively and alone within her project TOMIKO Archive.

In Istanbul, these photographs have been encountering her since 2010, during her roaming walks through the city.

 These accidental encounters formed the basis of a project – now underway for over ten years – to rewrite the history of Istanbul: following the desire to write her own artistic, poetic, and feminist chronicle of the city, E. İolanda Patrizia Bach Ruscello wandered through Istanbul and her periphery, tracing the old photographs – guided by clues to their origin found on their backsides.

In doing so, she made it her task to trace the secret agreement between past generations and the present one, making no distinction between the major and the minor.

She documented the city in photographs and additionally recorded all of the more than 1,400 street names she walked.

Out of this method grew an ongoing project on several levels: artistic research into the renaming of these street names[1], accompanying texts, archival- and city drawings, as well as photographs both found and her own.

Setting this material into ever new constellations, the artist interrogates her own and our culturally conditioned ways of seeing historical material and historiography.

For her solo exhibition at the German Consulate General in Istanbul, İolanda Patrizia has designed a site-specific installation responding to the colonial history of the architecture and interior – composed of the Istanbul convolutes of her TOMIKO Archive, drawings, and text excerpts from Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History.

In the form of the photographs, the trash of history defies – boldly, lovingly, and proudly – the process of transmission, that very process which now surrounds it in the shape of the building.

The accompanying archival drawings are understood by the artist as visual contributions to the margins and limits of research work: where words fail and intuition takes over, İolanda's drawing practice begins – her way of making the most inconspicuous of all transformations visible, with the greatest possible attentiveness.

The overall concept will take shape in a collaboratively conceived publication and exhibition, bringing together all parts of the project and inviting others to contribute.

[1] For this, she pursued intensive research in the private city archive of Aslı Odman and Jean-François Pérouse in Tarlabaşı as well as in the Salt Research Archive Istanbul, complemented by a digital pursuit of traces together with Duygu Yeral.

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A multilayered work like this can only be carried through the support of many others.

İolanda Patrizia Bach Ruscello would especially like to thank Asena Günal and Aslı Odman for their ongoing, long-standing support and friendship, Duygu Yeral for embracing the most unlikely research paths towards more than 1,400 street names, the Salt Research team, as well as the entire team of the Goethe-Institut Istanbul and the Kulturakademie Tarabya for their equally enduring support, and Katharina Dolezalek for her trust in showing this project at the German Consulate General Istanbul.

In addition, the artist would like to thank the generous sponsors and all the unsung supporters working in the background.

Notes: The italicised excerpts are free citations from Walter Benjamin's text On the Concept of History
English version: Translated by Harry Zohn