Anna Passlick is currently living and working in Berlin, where Off-University provides her with a platform to engage with digital education as a strategy to sustain critical knowledge threatened by anti-democratic regimes.

“Ever since I can remember, I’ve been passionate about drawing, painting and turning stories into images. This illustration project is a first attempt to engage creatively with some of the conversations and encounters I had while doing research for my MA dissertation project in Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London.

My research for this project focused on people’s accounts of violence in relation to 15th July 2016, when Turkey underwent an attempted military coup during which more than 200 people died. Detentions in the aftermath of the coup didn’t only target officials responsible for organizing the attempt, but also numerous members of political opposition parties, human rights activists, intellectuals and other critics of the Turkish government. How did their stories of pain relate to the political event of the military coup itself?

The notions of violence that I came to encounter through members of the group Academics for Peace, Kurdish and other leftist circles are highly complex. Their stories treat the event of 15th July 2016 as a surface for the echoes of a far more distant violent past of military coups, for different geographic sites of violence, and for accounts of the little violences that make daily life under authoritarian rule. In my illustrations I have sought to pay justice to this troubling condition of violence continued.”