Ottoman History Podcast - Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul

Episode Date: June 13, 2026

with Mine Yıldırım hosted by Önder Eren Akgül | What does canine life reveal about the human worlds of modern Istanbul? In this special collaboration with Keyman Podcast at Northwestern University, we sit down with Mine Yıldırım, curator of the exhibition "Between Care and Violence: The Dogs of Istanbul," to discuss the intersecting histories of cruelty and compassion towards animals in Turkey's largest city from the late Ottoman period to the present.    « Click for More »

What happens, what unfolds if you look at the history of modern Turkey from the vantage point of the street dogs. How do we write a history of beings, these animals, who are constantly silenced, who appears only the edges of the, only at the margins of the institutional archives, human records, newspapers, official state documents, if not entirely absent? Rescuing one dog is always collective. Violence is always massive, but care is always individualized and singular, and it requires collective work. It requires every one of us to rescue a child. As a Turkish and Kurdish saying goes, it takes an entire village to rescue a child.

It takes an entire academic work, archive, and the practice of archiving, and all the collective will to protect these animals at this point. Hello, I am Onder Oren Akul, a post-doctoral fellow. in the K-Mamon Modern Turkey Studies Program at Northwestern University. Welcome to the first episode of a series on Modern Turkey, co-produced by Kaman podcast and Ottoman History Podcast. Today, from Istanbul's Khrush neighborhood, we are recording the very first episode of this collaboration

with my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Mene Yilderum, about her recent archive and research exhibition on Istanbul's dogs. The exhibition between care and violence, dogs of Istanbul, by Mene and open to the public between April 16th and August 10th at Salt Beowlu in Istanbul as part of the Life of Animals exhibition curated by Joanna Zielinska. I assume it will be exhibited in various places around the world in the future. Welcome, Mena. Thank you. Hello. As we are going to talk about during this episode, the exhibition feels particularly relevant now as Turkish government passed legislation

last year targeting the removal of millions of dogs from the streets. I consider myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit this impressive exhibition and see Mena's work, which explores the long and often complex, complicated history of urban dogs in Istanbul. It covers historical events and processes from the mass exiles of dogs in 1910 to current issues surrounding displacement, shelters, and urban identity using a variety of archival sources, field notes, life narratives, and photographs. Before we start, I would like to introduce our dear guest Mene Yilderum is a social scientist, urbanist, and critical animal studies scholar whose work bridges the intersection of critical animal studies, human-animal relations, veterinary ethics, and urban history. She is currently an assistant professor in the core program at Kadir Haas University, Istanbul, where I was fortunate to have work with her during the 2020-23 academic year.

She received her PhD in Politics from the New School for Social Research in 2021. Minet's publications and public scholarship integrate animal and urban history, political ecology, and multispecies ethnography, contributing both to academic debate and to animal rights advocacy through her role at Dordaakshir, the four-legged city, an association dedicated to urban and animal studies. It's great to have you on the podcast, Mina. It's great to be here with you. Thank you. Thank you. So we'll start with, as I mentioned, this exhibition feels very, very timely.

How did the idea of presenting your academic research on dogs as an exhibition come about, and what motivated this project? Between care and violence, the dogs of Istanbul emerged out of the long trajectory of my academic research and research-driven animal rights advocacy here in Turkey. For years, I've been tracing the histories of Istanbul's dogs through municipal decrees, archives, veterinary records, documents, as well as through the memories, testimonies, life narratives, as you said, and everything. everyday encounters between humans and the dogs gathered on the streets. And what struck me was that and has always been that, while these traces reveal how profoundly dogs have shaped the city, the urban life in Istanbul,

they remained locked within academic writing and also scattered institutional archives, rarely accessible to the public. So despite the centuries of cohabitation between humans and the dogs, the dogs had been made very marginal in both scholarships. and collective memory. For me, the exhibition between care and violence became a way to articulate a kind of a counter-archive, to resist the forgetting,

to re-assemble the dispersed fragments of the lives and deaths and the coexistence that official histories and archives have pushed to the site. It's not only about presenting, like any other archive exhibition, it's not only about presenting documents, but also making visible with a political stand, foregrounding dogs as historical subjects, subjects of history whose presence and absence lives and deaths

tell us something fundamentally about the urban modernity, our urban history, and the intertwined histories of violence and care in Istanbul. So the idea came out, the idea of exhibition, turning my long years of research and advocacy into an exhibition, came out when Yohanna Zielinska, our dear creator, invited me to contribute to Istanbul edition of Lives of Animals. And I felt this was the right time. might be the right avenue, the space, the venue, the space to experiment with a different

archival practice. It's unlike an article, a journal article, or a book. An exhibition, archive exhibition allows a researcher for an embodied and a kind of an effective encounter. Visitors can move through the archive, pose before a document, a decree or an image, listen to a testimony, watch a documentary or a recording and feel the weight of these collective histories with the animals. My motivation, I guess my main motivation, was to create such a space of witnessing and history and how instead of being and being made as a kind of passive recipient of the history, kind of become an active witnessing, turn the visitors into active subject of witnessing, where the histories of dogs are not only abstract food notes,

but also part of our urban, our shared urban past, carried forward in ways that are political, emotional, but also deeply public. So if you go to the content of the exhibition, its main title between care and violence really captures the essence of the issue. And each section, there are five sections, and particularly the first four sections explores different forms of care and violence and how they have shifted over time. Could you explain how these two themes, care and violence, have interacted in the lives of Islam was blocked from the early 20th century onwards?

The modern history of the dogs in Istanbul are in the archives in the scholarship are beginning with this unfortunate, like infamous event of the 1910 mass dog exiles, followed by the Second Constitutional Revolution. It's one of the very first mass deportation and mass killing by way of exile in the early 20th century. So in 1910 when the Young Turk government and recently established Istanbul municipality decided to eradicate, quote and called street dog's presence in the city, the idea was to get rid of them for good, like to create and the motivation was to create a European outlook, an image, an image of a European or North American city, which is completely de-animalized, sterilized, the kind of the pinnacle of the... urban bourgeois, a kind of a mirror, an urban mirror of the emerging urban bourgeoisie that would reflect the image of the national identity and also the ideals of the westernization, Europeanization, etc. The event itself, the mass dog exiles, which started in the spring of 1910, lasted the captures, the forced captures and the relocation of the dogs,

more than 80,000 dogs to the Istanbul's most remote, smallest, uninhabited kind of a rocky island to Oksia to Sivriada. Also Mark's a major, in my reading, in my thinking and in the history of the dogs, it is widely accepted that marks a turning point. It's a catastrophe. It's a turning point where the tradition of care

has become twisted and a major rapture from the relations of care, taking care of the animals on the street, take a major turn with the major intervention by the state, by the government. After this incident, the violence becomes kind of the dominant paradigm that have been shaping dogs' lives in the city. But as a response to every act of violence, the relations of care, daily relations, the deeply entrenched cultural practices of taking care of animals, feeding them, sheltering them, protecting them, and all this effective regimes of mercy towards them, compassion and care towards,

them do not disappear when the violence sits they just strike back but in different ways they just their practices change spaces change and it changes so in my the title of the this archive exhibition is also the title of my dissertation as well i believe the lives of dogs in Istanbul just like dogs in many cities are caught up in this intertwined relation of violence and care these are inseparable, but also two opposite forces, dynamics that is kind of, that create a major vortex that kind of encapsulate dogs' lives. And it says being the dynamics and the terms and the discourse around this regime and the practices change, but they also evolve and co-evolve over the time. Violence, the acts of violence by the government, by orchestrated by the municipalities,

local authorities, shape how the care is manifested, is articulated in the same. city and in turn the politics of care, politics of living together with the animals and cohabiting the city with them also shaped the way violence unfold itself. So it's a two double-edged sword that is affecting and that's why beginning, starting from the early 20th century up until today, this exhibition, kind of the archive exhibition, articulates these inseparable. It is very important to me how to show, to articulate how the archive is, it's also inseparable in the archives. It's also the violence and care always merged into each other and shape each other. And the exhibition starts with a photograph by Sinan Jansha. It shows so it was on the third floor of the

Salt Bay Olu, the venue. When the elevator stops at the third floor, the visitor turns left and big white dog, a street dog, welcomes the visitors. It shows a large street dog sitting quietly, calmly in a very sovereign and composed way on a bank. in front of Blue Mosque in Eminen, Sultan Ahmed Cami, on a very foggy Istanbul morning. At first, when the visitor, when you look at this photograph, it feels very serene, very ordinary, but the longer you look, and it's captivate,

it kind of captures the visitors look, the more layers unfold. The dog sits on a bench, and the image stretched upward through the mist of the mosque emerge. And the animal is placed in between, between the sacred and the profane, between the monumental and the everyday life in the city.

And I believe for me this positioning was a way to introduce the dog as what will Kimmika and Suddunelson call a liminal being. In critical animal studies, street dogs are conceptualized, a liminal being, not as a domesticated companion inside the household, inside the private sphere of the household, nor fully wild and outside of the human worlds, outside of the city, but inhabiting the in-between spaces, the liminal spaces in the city, in the city district, street dogs occupy kind of a threshold.

And it's precisely in these thresholds that the inseparable forces of violence and care, as I argue, becomes the most visible. That bench on which our dog, white dog sits, rest, turns into a yellow line in the visuality of the archive exhibition. It does not only divide violence and care, but also connects together. On one side lies on the below of the yellow line. There's a long history of the violence. starting from 1910, deportation, major dog calls, confinement.

And on the other, on the above the yellow line, we see the practices of care, how they change over time, how the, what we can conceptualize as this assemblage of care, responds to the violence, how the practices of feeding dogs, sheltering them, protection change over the time, how the discourse of animal welfare, the good life of the animal change over the time. But these are never entirely separate,

despite the striking positioning of the yellow line. As I said, they continually, over the long durée of the 20th century, they continue to shape and define one another. Acts of protection can carry violence as well within them, and forms of violence are often justified in the language of care. So this duality is very important in my research and also in the exhibition. Beginning with this quiet dog, the calm liminal figure, allows the visitors, just like yourself, to see the tension from the start.

That's very important. The street dogs embodies the fragile line between belonging and exclusion in our history, life and death, care and harm, all the dualities, and how the dualities dissolve and reconfigure the lives of the animal. It is this inseparability that I have been thinking and the old exhibition sets out to explore in a nutshell. And the title, as you said, capture what I see as. a central paradox, how the dogs have been treated from 1910 up until today and how removal of

them, starting from the early 20th century, even today see as a kind of a necessary act of urban progress, westernization, or in today's political discourse, as a kind of integration or modeling, remodeling the city in the footsteps of the Western civilization, etc. All these are quote-and-quote terms, but is a kind of a violence and killing and removing dogs. eradicating their presence from the city as a kind of way of progress, quote-and-quote, and modernization. And also, the exhibition sets out, especially in the second episode, they are not sections, by the way, these are episode five episodes. It is very important because they are not dissected or intersected from each other, but these are episode,

like kind of a moment to, I use the term episode to kind of highlight how these are inseparable and kind of intertwined with each other, not like clear-cut sections or episodes of the history, but also not like the periods, for example. Yeah, yeah, exactly. A visitor asks about, like, how these episodes reflect the period, like specific periods, early Republican age or the 1980s. In a sense, yes, but in a sense, the episode cover

and kind of transgress the boundaries of any kind of periodization. This is about the like... Yeah, I think there's another duality between like continuities and raptors. like the soul is like... Absolutely, absolutely. And this duality of this violence and care, about the yellow line, the histories of care, it is also very striking to see

and I have been observing the visitors' reaction how the violence kind of disrupts and converts and the idea of the political imaginary of the care. The good life of the animals, the good life, the lives of the animals are increasingly being. replaced by the discourse of the good death, the discourse of euthanasia of the street dogs. Unfortunately, what have been very widespread and legalized in Turkey these days. So the euthanasia

of the street dogs, the idea of animal welfare instead of animal rights, their rights to live. Political imaginary of the no longer their good lives, but their good deaths, the kind of dictionary definition of the euthanasia, the good death of the animals, become established and institutionalized, starting from the early Republican days by the Istanbul Society for the Protection of Animals, Himay Haivenat Jemieti, and also the exhibition, the second episode, also sets out to explore these changes, the emergence of this discourse, this new Western-looking, and also the aspirations to kill the dogs. If the act of killing is necessary, the idea is to use more quote-and-called modernized and civilized methods of doing that.

So the emergence of it's also very important to see and to show through the traces in the archives how this idea came together and established what we call today, this euthanasia universe in the history and in the politics of loving and killing animals. I mean, I should say that. As a visitor, I really, really found this yellow line very fascinating. Because in writing, if you happen to write, as an article or book, it might be easier to talk about all these dualities and stuff, but it has its own challenges when you're probably exhibiting them.

But this yellow line, I think, at least to me, it worked very well, like it's fascinating, very impressive, showing not only that there are dualities, but we shouldn't also think that's what I got. The history of care and the history of violence, when it comes to dogs, a separate, linear trajectory. It's very, like, as you said, intertwined. And again, as a visitor, but this time as a visitor who is also a historian, there's another fascinating thing to me in the exhibition.

When I visited it, it was like walking through an archive. So do you see your work this exhibition, but also your activism, academic research, as acts of archiving, archiving the lives of Istanbul's docks? I would love to hear your thoughts about that. Yes, I definitely see my work as an art. That's what I try to do. That's what I, that my intellectual motivation and political motivation also lies. But I approach archiving in a rather broader sense, I think.

It is to many visitors or to many like emerging scholars like ourselves, word of archive, maybe not the historians, but the social scientists or the urbanists or the animal rights scholar. The word archive might sound or doing an archival research might sound intimidating. it might feel a bit distant and also like inaccessible. But practice the act of archiving today and like kind of from the perspective of the history of the present, what we are going through has a long history is behind it. Through the work of the archive, so you dig the archive, you unfold many hidden or marginalized item, you find something, you find it fascinating, many things go to the,

you don't use them as part of the exhibition, not necessarily an exhibition material, but it's anything helps you to build a narrative. It's a narrative. It's a work of a narrative. But also it's a very politically and ethically engaged, implicated work. For me, it's not only about collecting or preserving documents or showing them, exhibiting them, scanning and copying them and putting them in three-dimensional, but it's also about creating conditions for the memory, for this encounter,

for witnessing and for accountability of the institutions, of the historian, of the politically, the motivated minds and souls that are concerned about the lives and the future of these animals in the city. Street dogs, of course, don't leave behind diaries. We don't have official records. We don't have in Turkey, not in this day, not back in the day. We don't have theories. We don't have official archives that register these acts of violence, particularly about them. We don't have them.

Their lives, the dogs' lives surface only in fragments. So you need to look for the fragments in municipal decrees, court files, veterinary, reports, photographs or short notes in a newspaper, a very short interview, a very short commentary or a polemical writing, piece of writing. So part of my task, my motivation, has been to gather these fragments, very humble, very modest, but very significant fragments that I see. And to ask, how do we write a history of beings, these animals, who are constantly silenced, who appears only the edges of the, only at the margins of the institutional archives, human records, newspapers, official state documents, if not entirely absent.

How do we write? This is where also, like, I love using, and I'm very inspired by the idea of Saeedia Hartman's critical fabulation. You need to build a critical narrative. She reminds us, Hartman always reminds us, when the archive is violent, it's completely dismissive or silent, we have to read against the grain to imagine we have to read the archive as a use our practice of archiving as a counter-archive.

So to reimagine, to reconstruct what is missing. So there's a deep and very complex methodology behind not only my deepest love for the animals, but there's this idea and push towards the kind of historiography of what is missing, what is being silent. And in that sense, my research becomes a kind of, I believe, and I wanted to be a counter-archive on this step, not an archive of monumental statecraft, not as a glorified archive of violence, but of everyday encounters where the core of the violence and care stands and becomes legitimate and legitimized

in the very, even in the cases of very extreme intervention and killing. So these are uneven traces. So the violence, especially when orchestrated by the state, by the municipalities, leave very huge marks. You see, you read on the newspapers, where the care becomes, it kind of withdraws from the sphere of visibility. It becomes very invisible. it kind of preserve itself as a kind of what I believe, what I argue, as an undercurrent. It becomes very subtle. It withdraws, subdued, but in a very powerful way,

continues to survive in this culture, in the city. And bringing all these material, these uneven traces of the historic histories of violence and care into exhibition was also in a kind of, there's definitely a kind of making it more, the archive, more accessible, kind of a democratizing. It's just opening the archive in a very broad sense and making it public, accessible and embodied, like kind of the rewriting, kind of re-narrating the history of the effect of the embodied histories of this human dog relations. So visitors of the between cares and violence did not only look at the documents. They walk through them. As you said, they feel the weight as often speak, they speak back to me. And in doing so, also contribute. I wish,

And I think in the future versions of this exhibition, I'm planning to, and I'm wishing to integrate a kind of a notebook, a kind of an ongoing writing of an archive, not only a visitor notebook, but also ask the visitors to kind of articulate what strike them most, what they think could have been different, what shocked to them or what was kind of irrelevant for them, unnecessary, etc. In that moment, it's very important that the people, like living, breathing, and visitors kind of becomes, contributes to the counter-archive, and we do this together as a kind of collective memory. Many people, like there are hundreds of anecdotes, but what has been very striking to me, I think, in the opening week in mid-April, an elderly male whose childhood he spent in Istanbul, He told me that he witnessed almost all these episodes of killing dogs. And yet he said he's still here, came to this exhibition to see. And he said it's still very emotional and touching for me,

not to see what he has been going through, to see those animals suffering, dying, poisoned, shot to death, etc. But also to see that how his childhood memories is also part of this archives. So they matter. They take a place in the archive. they can take a place in someone else's research and work. So we continue to rethink what has done to these animals. It's not their lives mattered, their deaths mattered for millions of people.

They don't have names. Their lives and deaths are not registered. We don't have life and death registers in Turkey, unlike many other countries. But we have their widespread presence still. So what keep them alive? What help these animals to survive, to live together amongst the human, in this growing dynamic metropolis is the human beings, human beings love and care for them. So it's very important for the visitors to articulate their own experience as part of the Contra Archive.

That's when I also value very much. Yeah, I want to also ask about the reactions of visitors later, but I like this idea of archiving or the practice of archiving as counter archive. As the exhibition also shows, it's always an unfinished project. It's not only about the past. it's always about also future and the present time. So if we go to another history-related question, terms like deportation, mass dog cult, massacres,

exile, confinement, carcereal geographies, are very prominent in the exhibition. How does this exhibition and your work in general challenge allow us to, what do you think, I mean, to rethink the history of modern Turkey? Do you see parallels between state practices of controlling dogs? and those affecting human groups. Thank you for this question.

This is very important. And the short answer, yes, in this exhibition, I very deliberately use the terms and the concepts like deportation, mass exiles, confinement, or the language of the carcels, geographies, which is a huge emerging, growing field of research. I use this concept because I'm very concerned about one question, which has been guiding my research since the earliest of Dr. Rie. research, what happens, what unravels, what unfolds. If you look at the history of modern Turkey

from the vantage point of the street dogs, what do we see, what do we get, what do we see, do we see something that human-centric approaches to this history do not show us? What does it reveal? How do dogs take part and contribute to our understanding of history and this politics of historiography? For me, these words are not neutral. They are, very politically embedded. Of course, they belong to the language of our history, of the governance, of the human populations, and the population management of deciding

and the idea, the authority, political authority, in the moment of deciding and acting upon that decision, who belongs to certain territory, certain identity, and who does not, who has right to live within the jurisdiction of the certain territory or which population do not have right, and whose lives are recognized as legitimate part of the belonging, whose lives are considered to be legible to and eligible for citizenship,

whose lives are being ended, who is being killed with impunity without any kind of punishment without being lives or deaths being out of the records, whose lives and that are left out of the records. This is, of course, very motivated by the history of the mass deporting. history of the catastrophe, history of the Armenian genocide, history of all the genocides in the modern history of Turkey

and the Middle East, this speaks back kind of trying to open up space for not only just for the sake of building parallels between the human and animal histories, but also to ask and to understand how, what does the dog's history reveal tell us more about the human history, kind of, tell us about the logic of governance,

the spatial politics of it. of this is that's why the language of the carcels of geographies. That's why the geography matters, because geography embodies all this shared precarities between marginalized human population and animal bodies, animal populations. That's why the carcerality, the politics of incarceration, kind of the large, the broader sense, the politics of confining, isolating, marginalizing certain populations, the fragile bodies,

the bodies that are made fragile, illegible and illegitimate by the certain logic of These are very important in my work. And when I think about the early 20th century, 1910 mass deportation of dogs, I see not as an isolated incident, but as a kind of a broader moment in the late Ottoman Empire. And in the early 20th century, it happened just after the 1910 Constitution Revolution when the state was reimagining its political order, its identity, kind of the national identity, modernizing the city, the imperial capital, and seeking to manage the what they call unruly population, what they call the Cerseries, the vagabond law, as part of the police law.

And all these are mass dog deportations are embedded in a larger political and historical context, which we need to think very, read very carefully against the archives because there are many silenced elements of the archive. And sending thousands of dogs, exiling them to an island to die, was framed as an act of progress, purification of kind of eradication and extermination, but also a purification.

So the language of purifying an identity, getting rid of the unnecessary, unwanted elements. But in reality, it was also about remaking the city and its identity. So when I place the mass deportations of 1910 to the mass deportation of Armenians a few years later, the parallel is, of course, striking. And it doesn't go without problems. we need to be, when we build this parallels between the language of the genocide, the language of this deportation, we need to be very careful. The point, of course, is not to equate or to generate like simplistic dualism or parallelism. The scale, the violence, the human devastation are vastly

different, of course. But I do see a shared logic of governance at work. And the state asserting power, as I said, by deciding who's out of place, kind of de-placing, displacing, who threatens the imagined order of the new polity, new political sphere, who must be expelled, exiled, and made invisible for the sake of identity building. These are, of course, very early 20th century, all left kind of unrepairable marks in the traces in many people, lives of many population. So this is why I often describes also the description of the street dogs as liminal also fits into this picture. They are never fully inside or outside. They occupy the threshold, the idea of threshold. Always every government, starting from the municipal government, unfortunately

has generated, has prepared its own mass dog extermination campaign, has launched and yet another wave of extermination. So they are never fully inside, nor fully outside. They occupy the thresholds of this urban politics. And there, just like in the turn of the 20th century, the removal from the city was not just about dogs. Anything related to dogs is never just about dogs. It was also about throwing the boundaries of those modern Ottoman and soon Turkish the city and citizenry. That's the idea of citizenship, what the idealized urban space looked like, how does the modern forming, emerging urban bourgeoisie should behave, should relate to animals. A human, modern urban bourgeoisie and his or her pet kind of contradicts this cohabitation culture with the street dogs.

So there's this ideal and there's this reality. So the push that's kind of incessant push towards this ideal of the European, the animalized city, kind of lies behind all this mass dog extermination. So when I use the history of dogs, it's not to shift attention away from human suffering, especially when we talk about the early 20th century, but to show how the techniques of population management, this purification and eradication and exclusion, operated across species, across different bodies, different identities, different beings.

So it challenges us to rethink, and this exhibition also tries to do that, to rethink modern Turkish history is a kind of also a multi-species process where violence and care kind of are as inseparable forces shaping belonging, once again shaping belonging, identity, exclusion, population management is like the rationality of this governance, the idea of governance and the logics and techniques of how the governments use technology and techniques use these institutions, how there's relations of violence and social care and the relations of solidarity across species kind of help to rebuild the, in a kind of said an unfortunate way to legitimize the another upcoming waves of violence, how these are

both, or the kind of interplay of those, it's very important to think about. You mentioned about the first image which starts the exhibition, and I think the fifth episode of the exhibit to me stands out particularly. It features a single powerful image that prompts viewers, at least prompted me to consider the future. potential of violence as well as the possibilities, future possibilities for resistance and care. And again, in a very intertwined ways between violence and care. Could you share with us more about this final episode? And I hope that our listeners would have chance to visit exhibition at some time, somewhere,

and see all the exhibition, but also I'm sure they will understand that more when they see this fascinating. impressiveness of the last image I think they will the listeners the audience will have chance also before addressing your question also the exhibition will be kind of the online exhibition will be also accessible at the website of la international the commons of museums and a little bit abridged version of course not the whole experience but I think will be satisfactory enough at least to visualize this as part of these materials. So the exhibition between care and violence, the dogs of Istanbul, starts and end with two photographs of two dogs,

like begins and ends with the photographs of dogs. Two very different images, very powerful, but both positions in between worlds. So at the start, as we discussed earlier, Thessina Jansansan's photograph for a large white street dog in front of Blue Mosque, enveloped in the fog. Now, we spoke earlier how that image captures the dogs

as a liminal being situated between the sacred and the profane, the monumental and the public everyday life between the visibility, invisibility. It sets the tone, the first image, the beginning image, sets the tone of the exhibition, reminding us how the dogs in Istanbul have always lived in the space of this fogginess, in-betweenness and liminality. The final episode is, as you said, returned to this idea of threshold. It very powerfully captures this idea of

threshold, I think, but in a different register. Here I chose a single powerful photograph to rescue of our dear Zarife from Mamak municipal shelter from Ankara. There's a little twist there. It's not a picture from Istanbul, but it is, I think, one of those, like history-making, kind of eye-opening, and it's already part of this history. That image of one street dog, in the image, a woman holds Zarifé, basically it's very touching, like, because I have been at that moment witnessing that at that moment, live, flesh and blood, but also to see the power of the photography, the art, and the power of photography as part of the archiving practice.

So a woman holds Zarifé, a street dog, who has been confined to. and who has been in the death row in a shelter. A woman holds, kind of, breaks into a shelter, holds very tightly in her arms, while many hands outside the shelter space reach out toward them. This photograph, like the opening one, to me, is about the in-between,

like the bench, the dog sits in the opening photograph. This time, the threshold becomes the boundaries of the shelter, the shelter space, and the shelter, all animal shelters now with the recent legionage, As you said in the beginning, are kill shelters, what we call kill shelters. They are either where the animals are being confined to death or they're just being killed under the conditions of confinement. So the photograph rescue of Zarifé embodies the tension between abandonment by the state, the absence of the state and the rescue between a life threatened by the institutional neglect. And when the state is present, when the institution is present, it is present to kill.

these animals and a life-re claim through collective care. So that's the shelter, the barbed wire of the shelter fence, shelter wall, becomes this yellow line kind of continuity, it represents the continuity of the care, but also in a very unmarked way, because we don't know where do we go from here when the violence, state violence, for the first time in the history of Turkey,

becomes legalized, becomes legally enacted. We don't know how the future of, of care. We hope and our collective, that's the politics and ethics of caring for the animals comes into picture. We work for, we organize, we do the grasswork, we do this research-driven advocacy to strengthen the collective care for this, and just to be able to push back this time legalized act of violence. But we don't know for sure. So there's this definitely, this is not a relation between violence and care. It's not a deterministic relation. It does not always push back. So it depends on how we organize, how we rebuild, re-imagine and reconfigure this bones, social bones, political bones, and the idea of rights.

Whose lives matter? Whose lives do not matter? Whose lives are killable with impunity? Whose lives are, this goes back from the question of the dogs to the genocide in Gaza, whose lives are being taken away with the entire world, is watching and don't do anything. How do we value the life? What is the value? Is it determined and shaped by the language of the through the language of the powerful? Is it the force or is it the legitimacy of the people and the collective and the collective histories whose life and whose ideas will prevail? So I wanted the exhibition to end this powerful image because after walking through more than a century of major expulsions, locales, displacement, I wanted to be a powerful image. visitor to leave the venue, the space, the museum space for future, with the idea, to feel the weight

of this future, impending future, we are, and the animals are at the threshold, are walking on a very thin ice. So Zerifers rescues insist that, yes, the violence and care are inseparable, but also reminds us that the care can be mobilized as a resistance. So what we call this humble, everyday, daily practices become very embodied sources of resistance, one way of resisting, reclaiming life, protecting life, and reclaiming the rights to live against the unjustified acts of killing and violence. Violence. So, like, it's not, in Turkish, we have this phrase like, Haivansavallelah, in Turkish

be animal lovers. It's not about loving animals. It's about respecting the lives and the place of these animals. So just as the opening image, the last image. When the visitors leave the venue, the ask, kind of in a way, ask the visitors to inhabit that in-between us ourselves, to put a hand, to reach towards the vulnerable, to reach towards the weak, to those in need.

And it's not an abstract notion of solidarity, not an abstract notion of mercy or kindness, but a kind of more politicized act of and this consciousness and the political will to protect and to clotheque. And to claim the public space, the publicness, and the public lives of these animals not confined to the shelter. Street dogs in Istanbul are urban beings. They have been part of the city for centuries and they will be part of the city in the future. So it's all about how we decide which direction it will take, how we do that, what kind of future we imagine with the animals,

not only for them, but also for ourselves. What kind of future collective publicity, the idea, the experience of public space, is it governed by the sheer logic of exclusion, violence, identity building, purification, and also all this like genocidal practices, or is it governed by collective lives? And also this are loving and caring for these animals. So that's how I wanted the visitors to end. And throughout the exhibition, I did. 10 guided tours, official and announced guided tours.

Some days, as a researcher, as an activist, I also did. I spent long hours at the exhibition just to be able to talk and to be observed the visitors. And this, I'm happy to be able to convey this feeling, the intensity of this moment. Rescuing one dog is always collective. Violence is always massive, but care is always individualized. and singular, and it requires collective work. It requires every one of us to rescue a child. As a Turkish and Kurdish saying goes,

it takes an entire village to rescue a child. It takes an entire academic work, archive, and the practice of archiving, and all the collective will to protect these animals at this point. In this co-production of Cayman podcast and the Altimonistory Podcast, we spoke with Mnayyldrum, about her exhibition between care and violence, docks of Istanbul. Thank you so much, Mina, for joining us.

Thank you for having me. And thank you so much for listening. See you on the next podcast.