Maretta is a worker in motion. She moves, pauses, questions, and continues—her body operating with mechanical precision while remaining insistently human. Through repetitive gesture and measured speech, the work constructs a poetic body that mirrors the logic of serial industry, where movement is regulated, productive, and expected.
At the centre of the piece is the tension between mechanics and meaning. Maretta’s body speaks as much as her words: together they articulate a critique of labour, gender, and language, asking how women’s bodies are shaped, disciplined, and read within industrial systems. When the mechanical becomes dominant, what happens to expression, to agency, to poetry itself?
The work investigates the relationship between machines and language, movement and voice, productivity and presence. Poetry here does not emerge in spite of the mechanical, but through it—embedded in repetition, rhythm, and constraint. The audience is invited to watch and listen closely, to encounter the body as text and the text as labour, and to perceive how poetry persists within and against mechanised motion.
The project is part of the subtheme Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss.
Author
Nalan Kurunç
Nalan Kurunç is a Turkish poet, translator, and writer whose work spans poetry, philosophy, and critical translation. Born in Eskişehir in 1984, she studied librarianship and anthropology at Hacettepe University and works across literary and theoretical fields, including Continental philosophy, new materialisms, autonomist traditions, radical theory, and feminism.
Kurunç is an active translator of philosophical and literary works into Turkish, and her translations include books and essays in cultural theory and social critique. Her translations and writing have appeared in literary and cultural magazines such as Gard Şiir Dergisi, Post. dergi, and Kafagöz Şiirsanat, among others.
In addition to her work as a translator and writer, she participates in editorial and cultural projects, and her poetry continues to be published and discussed within contemporary Turkish literary circles.
