Contribution short abstract:

A piece of rubble salvaged from a school building that was destroyed before its inundation under dam waters will illuminate the story of a contestation centered around the question of who is entitled to salvage in the material undoing of the grounds.

Contribution long abstract:

This presentation delves into my experience of conducting ethnographic fieldwork on gradually disappearing grounds. In January 2023, I revisited the site of my long-term research, a small town in the Çoruh Basin where Turkey's tallest dam had been under construction for a decade. In those days, the dam began to retain the river water, progressively submerging the grounds where the town's residents had built a laborious life in what they framed as a challenging and distant frontier zone. The process of dismantling the town before the water reached it proved to be as laborious as its construction. With the help of a piece of rubble collected from a school building that was dismantled and razed to the ground, I will tell a story of contestation centered around the question of who is entitled to salvage in the material process of undoing the grounds under submergence.