Soft Occupations

“Soft Occupations” began through conversations with Batur’s mother and grandmother about domestic labour, care, and the objects that accompanied their everyday lives. From these conversations, Batur gathered five objects: a wash basin, a Vileda mop, a bar of olive oil soap, a tülbent, and a hand mirror.

Batur enters the performance without rehearsing how she will use them. Each object is encountered through the body, allowing familiarity, instinct, and physical response to determine what happens. Gestures emerge through contact: an object may be held, carried, pressed against the body, resisted, or allowed to redirect its movement.

The objects arrive already carrying histories of use. Their familiarity comes from repetition, from the countless ordinary actions for which they have been handled within domestic life. In the performance, their expected functions begin to loosen. A tool associated with maintenance or care can become restrictive, intimate, burdensome, or physically demanding as its relationship to the body changes.

The absence of rehearsal leaves Batur’s own response uncertain. At times the body seems to recognise how an object asks to be handled; at others, the encounter produces movements that have no obvious domestic function. The performance stays with this space between recognition and invention, asking how much of a gesture can already exist in the body before it is consciously performed.

“Soft Occupations” approaches the archive through these encounters. Memory is carried through objects, but also through the body’s capacity to respond to them. As each object is activated and set aside, the work builds an accumulating vocabulary of gestures, tracing what remains when familiar objects are removed from their expected use and returned to the body.