Orhan Pamuk opens the cycle of debates «Thinking the Future» with a talk on the pleasure of reading and looking at art
«Just as museums conserve objects, novels preserve the pleasures, smells and colours of language.» These words were spoken by Orhan Pamuk during the opening talk of the cycle “Thinking the Future”, held at the CCCB. The Nobel laureate spoke to a packed auditorium about the links between the art of telling stories and the art of collecting objects for exhibition in a museum. For Pamuk, novelistic and expository accounts go hand in hand, and share a single end: to stimulate the imagination and sentiments of receptors, be they readers of novels or visitors to a museum.
The main character of Pamuk’s latest book, The Museum of Innocence, is a young man who, nostalgic for an impossible love, obsessively collects objects that remind him of his beloved. The objects that appear in Pamuk’s novel will also be exhibited in a museum (non-fictitious) which the writer plans to set up in the Çukurcuma district of Istanbul. Another project on which Pamuk is working is an exhibition about the city of Istanbul, to be produced by the CCCB in 2013, continuing with the series of exhibitions about cities and writers that the Centre began with James Joyce’s Dublin (1995).
The more political Pamuk
The Nobel laureate was also critical of the current situation of some museums, particularly those that are state-run: «They are very much concerned with what they represent, by the political image they present.» He said that exhibition centres are currently still in their infancy.
The public was treated to the more forthright, political Pamuk during the question-and-answer session, when attendants asked the writer questions about the accession of Turkey to the European Union, the future of the book in the Internet age and the use today of ancient Turkish. This video includes some of Orhan Pamuk’s interventions during the public question-and-answer session.