BLOCK LETTERS and Cursive Mountains: State-Writing, Sonic Mimesis, and the Virtual Topographies of the Dengbêj

“If we call freedom not only the capacity to escape power but also and especially the capacity to subjugate no one, then freedom can exist only outside language.”
Roland Barthes

This artistic research project investigates the relationship between landscape, language, and power in Northern Kurdistan through a practice-based inquiry into what I term state-writing—the convergence of sovereign law and spatial inscription. Beginning with the colossal nationalist slogans carved into Kurdish mountains after the 1980 military coup, the research examines how writing operates as a territorial technology that fixes language onto land. In contrast, the Kurdish Dengbêj tradition offers a sonic mode of inhabiting territory that resists inscription. Working with archival recordings of Dengbêj performances, I focus on non-verbal vocal ornamentations that echo avian calls and landscape acoustics. Through spectrographic analysis and 3D modelling, these sonic traces are translated into virtual terrains, generating topographies sculpted by frequency, amplitude, and duration. This process—conceived as a deliberate act of mistranslation—proposes an alternative epistemological pathway for territorialization beyond writing and statehood. Rather than overwriting the mountain slogans, the project explores how mountains can be reimagined through resonance. The resulting virtual landscapes articulate a fluid, non-cartographic territory: a moving sphere of sound that cannot be occupied, fixed, or policed.

Keywords: Sonic Visualization, State-Writing, Dengbêj, Virtual Topography, Orality, Counter-Territorialization, Sonic Mimesis, Acoustic Archaeology, Rancière, Epistemic Violence.