Fatma Bucak was recently featured as the Fellow in Focus at the American Academy in Rome. A Turin-based artist, she is the 2024 Fondazione Sviluppo e Crescita CRT Italian Fellow in Visual Arts at the Academy.
While in Rome she’s currently working on “We possess all things,” a multichannel sound installation consisting of a contemporary cantata performance in three acts, each of which is narrated from the perspective of a bird, a tree, and a flower. The production of the work entails extensive research on 1990s conflicts in the Middle East, the history of botany in the region, and a survey of cantata and operatic performances.
At Winter Open Studios in December 2023, Bucak presented ten small bronze sculptures of birds from Iraq as part of “We possess all things.” The animals, Bucak said, are threatened both by extinction in part due to the consequences of the American invasion of Iraq in the 2000s, and war in Iraq in the 1990s. Weighing from 180 grams to over 1 kilogram, the weight of each bird—in a formal reference to traditional sets of measuring weights—corresponds to the degree of the species’ vulnerability. AAR spoke to Bucak about her time at the Academy and her project. “Since arriving here, my ideas, thoughts and doubts have taken more pragmatic shapes,” said Bucak. “I came here mainly to read and to think, but I have found other needs: for new collaborations and new methods.”