Page - 104 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

104 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Lora Sariaslan | The Art of Migration patterns with those used for soldiers’ uniforms highlights the unwelcome truth that the two are seldom if ever separate. Textiles are also an apt metaphor for the fluidity of cultural movement and cultural exchange, since textiles were always in some way included in the trade routes since antiquity. We can also recall the paintings by Venetian artists like Carpaccio from the end of the fifteenth century in which the city is bedecked with sumptuous carpets and its citizens in rich silks and damasks. Just like in most of Koçyiğit’s works, the title has a twofold meaning. The title Agent Or- ange is borrowed from the military and defense system. Agent Orange – or Herbicide Orange (HO) – is one of the herbicides and defoliants used by the U.S. military as part of its herbi- cidal warfare program, Operation Ranch Hand, during the Vietnam War (1961-1971). The US troops sprayed 72 million liters of herbicides over the surface of South Vietnam. The aim was to deprive the Vietnamese resistance of concealment, and to destroy crops, thereby forcing farmers to leave their lands and thus undermining local support for the guerilla. The most used defoliant was Agent Orange, which was sprayed from airplanes and came down as a white mist. It was given its name from the color of the orange-striped barrels in which it was shipped. Hence, Koçyiğit’s title creates a web of connections and affiliations. Moreover, this title perfect- ly matches the military feel of the work, created through a multiplicity of camouflage textiles that the artist purchased in different markets in the Netherlands. He enriches the composition by the further addition of the different historical sites that ISIS has destroyed in recent times. Simultaneously, by creating imaginary maps, Koçyiğit points out the ‘must-haves’ of any coun- try, its historical landmarks. However, instead of presenting the ones that exist, he focuses on the destroyed elements, questioning the system of creating nations, borders and landmarks. What happens when they no longer exist, does the country cease to exist, as it was once known? Playing immaterial subjectivities against the map’s conventional material objectivity, these works confront us with both likeness and strangeness. The places they map are very much the ones we inhabit. Whether or not we belong in them, they represent a world that surely belongs to us. Furthermore, they show a conception that fuses uncertainties, fears about place, with physical and locational complexities involved in mapping. We can call Servet Koçyiğit’s maps organic not only to emphasize their paradoxical realism, but also their inherent openness to subjectivity. The act of viewing itself becomes a sort of transnational movement. In contrast with the daunting objectivity of political maps, Koçyiğit presents a subjective, even living map, which contains the same places but in the way we really know them, in relation to our own changeable location. It is not a map where we can find our home or point of origin more easily, but rather, and far more valuably, one where we can locate ourselves, as we move, here and now. Koçyiğit’s work is full of fascinating plays on mapping. It questions almost every aspect of the ostensibly shared world the traditional map enforces. His maps do not retreat from describing the world in familiar geographic terms; rather, they have additional elements, which overlay, and undermine established conventions. Koçyiğit does not reject or erase his context of origin, but rather employs his background, experiences and encounters as the sources from and through which he can create both an indi- vidual as well as artistic agency. Servet Koçyiğit reflects on the meaning of place – a reflection linked to his own autobiography. He generates a new way of looking at the fragmented reality that makes up our present. The artist’s commitment to charting new territory signals a shift