Pembe

Year 2019
Text Forensic composite sketch of the kindergarten teacher who killed the colour “pembe”, made in collaboration with the Forensic Psychology department in University of Central Lancashire.
> Pembe means pink in Turkish and it was a colour I used extensively while drawing pictures in the kindergarten. I loved the colour. It was a real love, I would look at my crayons in various tones of pink and would feel a tingling sensation in my stomach. Then something happened and I started to hate the colour. I couldn’t remember the reason until recently: One day, I was drawing with my pink crayons in the kindergarten as usual, and a school teacher who apparently had noticed my adoration to the colour, came to me and said that it was girl’s colour and I shouldn’t be using it. She convinced me to believe that I was doing something really bad which in return turned into hatred. I couldn’t remember her face, perhaps forgetting was a child’s queer strategy of survival. The image I had of her was very blurry but with the help of the Forensic department at the University of Central Lancashire in Britain I was able to reconstruct her face. The killer of a colour. The work’s title does not refer to the pink colour in circulation today, instead, it refers to a colour that once was called “pembe” by a 5 year old, a colour that does not exist anymore.