Following the coup d’état in 1980, Turkey in the 1990s witnessed both the visualization of public culture thanks to the rise of television and video technologies as well as massive human rights violations resulting from the counterinsurgency measures by the state. While television channels communicated public reality predominantly within the official framework of the state, the collective practice of what I call videowork, became the primary means for producing and archiving the unofficial visual documents of a decade characterized by rights violations, protests, fact-finding missions, trials, testimonies, alternative public gatherings, etc. Due to a lack of non-governmental archival institutions, these video records of the decade, mostly reside in a dispersed and uncatalogued manner in the depositories of institutions or personal collections.
Drawing upon ethnographic, media archeological, and archival research, this presentation explores the collective practice of videowork and the video records in the context of state-sponsored violence and violations of the 1990s in Turkey, in terms of their archival potential to testify to historical injustices and communicate hope and resilience for justice to come.