Taking Place, Becoming Iconic: What It Takes for Urban Protests to Become Visible and Significant

We seem to be living in a time of revolutions which do get televised or at least tweeted, or both. Yet, for a given observer, most political upheavals are remote “news“ about numerous distant struggles. Today the world is full of conflict and associated visual strife. Struggle for power blends with struggle for recognition, blurring the symbolic boundaries between the two. Each national outbreak has the potential of shaking the international stage and even punching above its own weight, provided it is properly shown and referenced. If this social process does happen, it is possible in no small measure because of sustained visual exposure that helps turn a given local occurrence into a translocal event, or – to use Bruno Latour’s parlance – ‘a matter of fact‘ into ‘a matter of concern.‘ Conversely, if sustained visual exposure and iconic contextualization don’t happen, even genuine rebellion or protest may come across as underwhelming, or simply go unnoticed. All kinds of media, old and new, are the usual suspects here. Just about any social occurrence is subject to the constraining influence of visual framing and rhetorical deployment. Thus, visibility and iconography must be thematized, “practices of looking“ unravelled and the politics of visual culture scrutinized. Similarly, the importance of the specific spaces at which protests take place must not be underestimated. The present paper explores these themes in the context of the Gezi park civil unrest that shook Istanbul and the international community in 2013.