Efe Cengiz Annotations

Visualizing "the Point" of the Project (https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/sketch-visualizing-point-project/essay)

Wednesday, August 12, 2020 - 4:08pm


Getir (Turkish for Bring!) is a grocery delivery company operating in Turkey. These couriers, once thought "unskilled, uneducated, etc." now became "essential". The spectacle is thus; these brave people risk their lives, delivering necessities to your door, so you can stay healthy, inside your house. Getir did a lot of hiring when the first wave of quarantines occured in Turkey, many of those workers are now unemployed as lfie became "normal" once again. What is "essential" in these workers are that they are essentially sacrifices, for even a greater spectacle than their heriosm; the economy. They are forcefuly made martyrs, as living check to check forces them upon these jobs, yet asking for safer conditions means they are simply replaced. Their lives and labour are the very spectacular tools that are used to first make them killable and then execute them.


A 52 yo nurse, beaten by cops in France, for protesting for better woking conditions.
The healtcare workers, too are spectacular killables; presented as heroes to be clapped from balconies, but quite literally unwilling martyrs made to march happily into their doom. What happens if one asks for better conditions in ones sacrifice? The regulatory tools of the sovereign functions.

One part of the general discourse that we have already forgotten about is the eco-fascism that rose to prominence once again, not only in the anti-lockdown protests globally but also in seemingly much more harmless discourse on earthy survival. The "world is healing", "humans are the virus" and "the masks are muzzles" discourses differ only in appearance. Their roots can be traced to that old Mathusian notion of the nobleman, having to "live and let die" the savage that knows not of "earthy survival/preservation". Understood in this sense, and related back to Mbembe's necropolitics, the Covid Pandemic becomes the perfect time to discuss for instance, how "Black Deaths Matter" and dealt/administered.

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