An instrument used since the Bronze Ages, the history of cymbals in Istanbul dates back to the Armenian metal master Avedis I who lived in the city during the 17th century. Having produced his first cymbals in 1618 from a bronze alloy he obtained himself, Avedis was nicknamed “Zilciyan” by the Ottoman sultan Osman II, who also commissioned the master to make cymbals for the Janissary army. The production of cymbals thus launched in Istanbul later expanded into Europe and the USA in a course of events shaped by political, commercial, industrial, and cultural transformations. The recipe developed by Avedis and transmitted orally from father to son provides the core production method for the cymbals manufactured in the city today by certain brands. Handmade cymbals are crafted by thousands of hammer blows; each cymbal contains an implicit potential left from the complex processes that has created it, a unique harmonic character determined by the behavior of the master who fashioned it. Vessel is a site-specific installation that makes use of stimulators to transfer an audio composition back to the cymbals it was recorded with. When the sound waves feed back to these instruments, coinciding with the natural frequencies of the cymbals through physical contact, the cymbals are excited and begin to vibrate. These frequencies, which grasp certain cymbals, and stimulate them to resonate, create a kind of echo chamber in which notions of identity, past, materiality, tradition and geography become aligned and audible. The cymbals that are part of this installation were manufactured at the Istanbul Agop factory using traditional methods. They were marked as scrap due to the various visual or auditory defects that they have. When these cymbals return to the factory, they will be melted and added back to the alloy to make new ones.
