28november, Tirana Albania

Please join us for a very special launch of the Banana Collection on Wednesday, 6 March 2019

The Banana Collection

19.00

28 November

Rruga 28 Nëntori, Kati 4 

Tirana, Albania

http://www.28november.al/

The Banana Collection is a thematic selection of books; a special, limited edition bookmark by Viola Yeşiltaç; 

and a rare beverage

One morning I decided to go for a coffee, as school is over for me and I feel rather lost without the structure of my language lessons and my daily routines. It is all to be set up anew; I guess it is time to leave Istanbul, no matter how torn I feel about it at the moment. I sat down in a small café at the corner of an intersection. The wind was sweeping the sidewalk sign into the street, a cat climbed up a tree, one dog was chasing another.

At the table next to me was a group of young students. They spoke German and I could not resist listening into their conversation, as they were talking about bananas. This banana thing has become a bit of an obstacle to me, as for months now I knew what bookmark I wanted to make—but where does the banana come in? 

One of the young students listed a few attributes of the banana to describe her dislike of “this weird, yellowish mush.” She concluded that she hated bananas. Besides the fact that the “banana comes in the shape of a smile.” 

In the summer you could buy the Lady finger banana from Antalya at certain bazaars and I personally prefer the smaller ones—for one, because the portion is more suitable for me, and these smaller bananas are sweeter in taste. I always wonder why it is such a rare occurrence to find this type of banana. 

The most commonly eaten banana, with its yellow, slightly curved appearance, is a cultivar called the Cavendish. A seedless fruit with a unique reproductive system, every banana is a genetic duplicate of the next, and therefore susceptible to the same blights. There are in fact multiple colors of banana; it is rather diverse like the apple, plus, it is actually a berry.

Entire Central American nations have been said to rise and fall over the banana. By concentrating all their efforts on the Cavendish, banana exporters have built a system that allows a tropical fruit grown thousands of kilometers away to appear on supermarket shelves in the UK for less than £1 per kilo—undercutting fruits like apples, which are grown in dozens of varieties much closer to home.

Large scale banana production has been conducted in Central America since the beginning of the 20th century. The development and success of this industry has resulted in the complete alteration of tropical lowland environments from Mexico south to Panama. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of rich and diverse tropical ecosystems have been transformed into the monotonous and chemical drenched landscapes of banana plantations. […]

The high demand for low cost and blemish free fruit has greatly influenced the cultivation methods utilized by banana growers. 

One of the museums I visited multiple times while in Istanbul was the Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam. I was particularly drawn to the section of medicine and ocular surgery of the 11th century, when great advances were made in ophthalmology, most prominently in association with Ammar ibn Ali al-Mawsili, who, toward the end of the century, developed cataract surgeries using a radical operation of the soft cataract with a metal syringe.

The instruments exhibited almost hurt my eyes from just looking at them. The combination of the sharp pointed edges of these metal instruments with the soft organic substance, the eye was troubling me. In German we call the eyeball Augapfel, as in “eye apple.” Maybe this is where we come back to the fruit? Even in the Bible, the “apple” consumed by Eve is a banana.

One instrument—a tweezers-like tool, the “raven’s beak,” made for removing whatever sticks to the eye or the inner side of the lid—caught my attention. Just one small obstacle, also a lack of a certain knowledge, can disturb, blur, or fog our vision. This made me think of the reason why I undertook this journey of learning Turkish. For nine months I avoided reading in English or German to focus all my attention on this language, in order to clear my vision. There was something buried away; this nagging feeling that I was ignoring part of my own heritage. To recover parts of it was—is—often frustrating and has even made me feel handicapped. Acquiring information has been very limited, due to my narrow knowledge of vocabularies and my understanding of the language over all. It is a fantastic journey to dive into a structure of a language such as Turkish, which is logical and built almost like a complex whole. Taking on this endeavor has been like making use of the raven’s beak and removing whatever was stuck and in the way in order to understand parts of this cultural heritage that I have been neglecting for so long.

— 

Viola Yeşiltaç

28 November purveys texts (new, used, bootlegged) that relate to independence, anarchy, spaces of exception, desire, withdrawal, noncompliance, self-management, forms of identification, love.

All and anyone is welcome. 

🖤