On the notion of Home
Conversation with Baran Caginli

The discussion was made in 2022 when Baran was still studying at the Fine Art academy of Helsinki. He graduated in 2023



During summer 2021, Helsinki held its first biennial titled the same sea. The first edition of Helsinki Biennial took place in Vallisaari, an island of the Finnish capital archipelago. Visiting the island, I came across the work expressions by Baran Caginli, a work exploring notions of home and the refugee crisis. The work struck me. It gave me an outset to further explore what it means to feel, or being, at home in Finland. Do I feel home in Finland? Do I belong here? Am I accepted? To answer these questions, I needed to learn more about Caginli's concept of home and the issues he raises about immigrant identity and displaced people. 

I had already met Baran when working at the Finnish Photography Museum in 2018. Baran works with many topics that include collective memory, state domination, power, and control. At the time, he was exhibiting one of his works, “Who were they” related to identity and the children of Sur, who lost their family and friends and were forced to move from their homes. 

He started studying for a master's degree in Turkey but could not finish it due to political reasons. He came to Finland in 2017 as part of a residency program and received grants that allowed him to stay and avoid deportation. After Baran received an A residence permit, he also was given a right to study, which meant that he could continue his education without paying the enormous tuition fee that the government is imposing on non-EU students, which today currently stands at around 15,000 €. 
Baran and I arrived in Finland around the same time, and despite our different backgrounds, I felt we had some common questions.


You are now studying in the Fine Art Academy of Helsinki, what is your experience at the academy??


        After staying a few years in Finland, I got granted an A-permit which is the  formal permit. It is the step before the permanent residency permit and is difficult to obtain. There is a hierarchy involved with these permits. At first, I got a grant from Kone Foundation and had some money saved, which allowed me to get a two year permit. I wanted to complete the master studies that I could not finish in Turkey. I think it is good to have a master's degree from a Finnish University. You will be more trusted and taken more seriously. Being in Kuva (short for Kuvataideakatemia), I feel it is more theoretical and less technical than it was in Turkey, where there was a strong hierarchical academic structure, and it was a lot about technique. Here, I can read more theory and it is more flexible. I was used to a very traditional, imperialistic, and colonial way of learning art history as in Turkey, the teaching is really based on the Western canon. 


Your artwork expressions focus on the question of home and the longing to return. It affected me deeply despite the fact that I migrated by choice and was not forced to. Although, the question of home, and where we feel at home, is important to me. Once you leave the place you grew up in, it becomes a different place, it exists only in your souvenir and you have to create a new home, and memories attached to it. As stated in your work, is there no home for you, or is it possible to create one otherwise?


         It is a good question. Personally, I did not come here by choice. It was the only place where I could come and did not know if I would want to stay. 
When I arrived, in the beginning, it was difficult for me to think “ok this is my home now” and today, I still do not know if I can stay here. Next month I am going to Migri (Immigration office) again and will apply for a permanent residency permit. There is always the possibility of being deported. 
(ed. The interview was conducted before the release of the severe immigration restrictions that the new far-right government is planning to impose to all migrants in Finland).
If I returned to Turkey today, the place where I grew up, the people, my friends, and my family would not be the same. Everything has changed, and you are no longer there, so it no longer feels like home. Here, I try to feel more at home. I try to meet people and have a family. I do not know if it is correct to say that Finland is my home now. It is possible. It has the potential (laugh). I will not move to another country because it was mentally really heavy for me to come here, and I would need to start from the beginning again. I never want to do that again. My partner asked me if I wanted to move to Germany. But what would I do in Germany? Now, at least, I have friends here. I do not want to move anywhere else. 


So, would you feel that you're in between? In between cultures and identities? In your work, you mention the question of home, but it also implies the need to identify yourself somewhere? Do you feel that you have multiple identities?


          I do not know and it is difficult to say. In my opinion, if you are born in Finland from foreign parents, you are still not seen as a Finnish citizen. If you are from outside of Europe, people see you as an outsider. So, if I am the first generation who came from outside of Europe, it is really difficult to try to identify myself as Finnish. I cannot be Finnish, I am just an immigrant living here. For my identity part, it is complex. My mother is Turkish, and my father is Kurdish. When I was a kid, I did not see any need to identify myself as Turkish or Kurdish because in any way, it was already forbidden to say “I´m Kurdish”. Nowadays, when people ask me, I say that I am Kurdish, because it is a huge minority in Turkey, and my father's side struggles and suffers because of Turkish nationalism. When I say I am Kurdish, it is a way for me to support this cause. I can speak for them, and I have the right to say that I am Kurdish. But I am also Turkish. I have a Turkish passport. 
In addition, when I arrived here and I was told that I am Kurdish, people often had this militarist romanticism in mind. “Oh, you’re Kurdish, you must have been fighting for freedom” but the majority did not care about the cause. I stopped saying I am Kurdish because of this image of militarist romanticism that comes with it. The Kurdish movement is not only about fighting for freedom. There are a lot of things in the Kurdish identity, negative and positive things. So, to go back to my cultural identities, as I said, it is complicated, and in Finland I feel I do not have the permission to say that I am Finnish, you know. There is always the risk that even if you speak the language and you are born here, you will not be integrated as a Finn. 


In expressions, I point at this feeling of identity in connection to the place where I live. When I was in Turkey in 2014 and 2015, I was working for a refugee organization doing workshops for refugee kids. They were maximum 12 years old and most of them were orphans. It is something that really affected me. I am not a refugee, but I can understand the view of being one. These kids were from Syria or Iraq, and they could not go back to their homeland because of the war. And even if they would have the possibility to go back, it is not their country they would recognize as everything is destroyed. Some of these young people could not even remember their childhood before the war. 
So, if they went back, what would they see? What would be their feelings about the place? Is there a home for them? I do not know… 
Once, we were watching The Wizard of Oz together. In the film, Dorothy, the main character, tries to go back to her house. In order to return, she needs to wear these red shoes and repeat three times “there is no place like home, there is no place like home, there is no place like home.” I was wondering if these kids would have these shoes, how and where would they go back? Where they are from, everything is devastated. They can never go back. They can just experience and imagine their future through their memories.


For this work you used a ‘souvenir’, a memory, from this refugee camp. Is making politically relevant work important to you? How aware are you of this inclination in your thinking process? I wonder how much you believe in the influence that Art can have on local and international politics in terms of actual decision-making? 


        It is hard to say. I do not think I am doing political art specifically. There is just no other way for me to make art. I always try to show something or refer to some problems which are invisible in society. Before 2013, I was so happy. I was not involved in politics; I did not wanted to. Then the Gezi Park protests started. We occupied the park and the protests spread all over the country and a lot of people were killed. It is complicated if you have a dictator at the head of your country. In 2015, I happened to be in Kurdistan when the ‘war’ started in the region (ed. from the turkish-kurdish conflict 1978-present).[1] When you experience a war and see the chaos around you, you do not give a fuck anymore about doing “nice art”. I was thinking about what I can do to help people to solve these things. Fighting was not an option for me. I chose to use my artistic practice. It was the only way. 




On another note, I would like to know your opinion about the dominant narrative that we can encounter in Finland. That narrative silences or represses communities such as Sàmi or Roma people and is based on ideas of romantic nationalism. I feel there is very little space for other narratives. In environmental science, the concept of environmental generational amnesia initiated by Peter Kahn and Thea Weiss, Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology of University of Washington speculates that "each generation perceives the environment into which it's born, no matter how developed, urbanized, or polluted, as the norm."[2] I would like to draw a parallel with the Finnish national collective memory within the context of the Art field. Do you agree that there could be a sort of visual narrative that is valued more and that would draw a voluntary amnesia from one side that is keeping the others forgotten? 


        This is a big topic; I feel the art field -mostly- is ruled by trends and fashion. For instance, when the Kurdish war started, people were really aware and were welcoming a lot of Kurdish artists to express themselves. After a few months, it was forgotten, and the art world moved on to the next big issue. Same thing happened for the Sàmi issue. Everybody is talking about them, but it will be forgotten again unless something happens again. There are walls between communities. Society is forcing you to show yourself to have attention and you need to compete against other communities to express your problems. You cannot organize solidarity among the communities because of the small space given to them. There is only one space available for a community [alongside the Finnish national narrative] to express itself through a political or social event, when it is done, you move on to another community. In that sense there is no multiple space that allows different communities to express and be given long time attention. Therefore, they need to compete with each other to have this attention and raise their own issues. But, when you do not hear about them, it does not mean that the problem is solved. The art field just forgets about it and moves to another one, getting recognition for humanistic values but in fact it is just serving its personal agendas. 
The important thing is solidarity. I have no solution for this problem but solidarity and empathy within art communities would help. Because the system is competitive, you keep on being in survival mode and think only about yourself. The grant system also makes you super competitive and it is this kind of individualistic behavior that kills solidarity.



I agree, solidarity and empathy are important. I'm wondering how much of this narrative we can tackle to try to expand expressions of other communities here and keep them running long-term. On that same note, during the parliamentary elections (April 2023), I noticed that the far right or nationalist parties were using lake and forest imagery, which is a big part of this national representation, as a background to support their program of defending a “Finnish identity” from “foreign invaders”. This imagery can shift to a nationalist vision if we´re not careful. We can't let this representation be privatized by far-right people. Sometimes, this spoliation of the landscape visuals makes me feel that these places will never be fully for me and that I won't ever belong there. As an immigrant who has lived in Finland for many years, does this Finnish narrative speak to you? Do you feel that as long as you don´t represent a certain aesthetic that follows the national imagery you won't be represented?


        If I go to a national park, it still makes me feel like a tourist. There are only limited things that I can take from this narrative. Personally, as an example, I would like to go running and feel connected to the forest like loads of Finns do, but I do not have time to do it or money to buy proper outdoor gear. I can just watch them when I go to work. This narrative is not for everyone, it is for marketing, I think. It is pure advertisement like the Finnish education system they sell abroad. 
Moreover, when I see the forest imagery used in the art field, I notice that there is a new generation of artists who are into pagan imagery of forests. And that is also something that neo-Nazis politicians are praising for. It is quite an edgy topic and also a dangerous slide. Artists can fall on the pathway of extremism by taking this pagan imagery, which is also linked to fascism. I am not saying that it is automatic, but there is some confusion in the art field and that should be considered. I also see that there is a big difference between Helsinki and the other cities, and they definitely do not share the same perception of forest imagery and its narratives. 


Do you feel that your work could participate to bring another imagery that would fall back on this national narrative? 


        I think I don't have anything from this Finnish narrative, and I cannot do anything. I also never thought about this before you asked me (laughs). In my practice, I also create by following what is going on around me. If something happens that inspires me, I may make something out of it. But in Finland, I am a permanent tourist.


In one of your previous work Blackout, you used a cartographic point of view to look at the landscape. As you mentioned in your work, the verticality view of cartography is defined as a factual science, a land representation for state domination and a way of control. By representing these landscapes, you create a new aesthetic with shapes, forms and pixels. What is the geopolitical idea behind this? What led you to the choice of different mediums for each work?


        I started the project in 2020. Today would be an interesting time to continue it because of the war between Russia and Ukraine. There are probably loads of places that are blurred or hidden now at the border with Russia. It is really easy to hide things in Finland because of the dense forest and nature in some areas. It is difficult to notice what is hidden in the maps. Maybe I could continue this project in the future.
I became aware of satellite censorship back when I was in Turkey. After 2010, I was doing research on a Yandex map (Yandex is the Russian equivalent of Google) and some areas of Istanbul were black. Not blurred or pixelated, just black, like patches. And I realized that they were military areas. The Turkish government did not want these black patches because it was making the areas obvious. On Google it was blurred and on Yandex it was black. Most of the military areas have been moved now, but I was checking how different it was with Google. An interesting thing is that in the USA, some areas are censored and blurred but if you check in Yandex they are clear. In Yandex, some areas in Russia are censored and blurred but on Google they are clear. It does not make any sense but it shows some power conflict and what governments want to show. 

In Greece, there is a rock in the Aegean Sea that was censored because Turkey and Greece are fighting about it continuously even though it almost disappears every full moon with the rise of sea level. I am choosing the medium that corresponds to the way of censoring. For my work vacation in Greece, I used Google Earth and when checking the Cephalonia international airport in 3D, I saw a strange view of the airport, a blurred one. I never saw something like this. I got access from Google, and I made a film to get every angle of the 3D blurry airport. I used photogrammetry with 6000 frames from the video, so I could get the 3D model.

The cement sculpture I made called no street names in palestine refers to the maps that are really low quality in Palestine, you cannot see anything. There, the Israeli occupation, and cement industry is connected with the destruction of Gaza. People cannot build their houses because the cement monopole belongs to Israel. The company does not sell the cement to Palestinians. They provide some for the Israeli government and Israeli settlers, but the Palestinians have limited access to it. It is part of the embargo along with food, water, medicine. On Google, there are no street names in Palestine, or if there are, they are in Hebrew. People call it “Hebraization”. The work was a concrete block with the shape of what is left of Palestine and its borders.

Censored areas are constantly changing with military situations. I am convinced that there will be some censored areas on Google in Finland, near the border with Russia, that you will probably be able to see in Yandex. The notion of territorial cartography shows substantial power blocks and their level of influence. It questions who pictures the lands, how and why? 
There is a website that refers to this and explains why a certain area is blurred or another is pixelated.[3]


If you would do something in Finland following this project, what perspective or vision would you draw on the Finnish landscape today?


        Actually, I wanted to make some works in Finland because there are censored and blurred areas in maps and cartography here, too. In Helsinki, you have half of Valisaari island and the military island, Santahamina, which are pixelated on maps. 
When I got invited for the Helsinki Biennale in 2021, I checked the satellite, and the military part of the island was blurred. So, on this border, I wanted to put a long colored plexi wall, the colors of which would be pixelated and would represent the blurred colors from the satellite perception, or view. When you walked on the pathway, the plexi, blurred with patterns of green, white, beige, and black, would obstruct the view to the other side. 

Clément Beraud







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[1] Amnesty international “Turkey: Curfews and crackdown force hundreds of thousands of Kurds from their homes”, Amnesty international website, 6th December 2016, https://tinyurl.com/5n89u3c7
[2] Peter H. Kahn and Thea Weiss, “The Importance of Children Interacting with Big Nature,” Children, Youth and Environments 27, no. 2 (January 1, 2017): 7, https://doi.org/10.7721/chilyoutenvi.27.2.0007.
[3] Density design, “How did the censorship of the researched places online change over time and which are the techniques used to censor them on Google Earth Pro?” in “Making the invisible visible” 19th of November 2019, https://tinyurl.com/mrceyz5k