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Contribution short abstract:

Reflecting on the ecological crises, I will tell you a story from northern Istanbul, exhausted by excavations. Through an architectural essay film, I employ creative recording/writing modes, entangling them to question architecture’s role between local community activities and material extraction.

Contribution long abstract:

I have been reflecting on the ecological crises confronting our planet, focusing on northern Istanbul, where I live amidst large-scale mega-projects. These include a new shipping canal parallel to the Bosphorus, the Istanbul Airport, and the North Marmara Highway, all of which disrupt local communities, traditional water buffalo grazing lands, and sensitive ecosystems while accelerating the city’s northward expansion. Living between these projects, I encounter at least 20 excavation trucks daily. Inspired by Jane Hutton’s (2019) concept of reciprocal landscapes, which highlights the territorial consequences of material extraction and transportation, I decided to follow an excavation truck one day, uncertain of what I might discover.

As an architect ‘living in the end times’ (Žižek, 2010), I interrogate my position through a subjective, situated, by-design methodology. My research focuses on an architectural essay film, portraying architecture as a malevolent character exploiting resources under the guise of progress and glamour. The film employs essayistic making as creative research to shape its narrative using three modes of recording: from inside a car in inaccessible geographies for woman and queer bodies, on foot where cars cannot proceed, and collectively walking to explore water buffalo habitats and their intertwined relationships with the land.

Intuitive and experiential, my research and filmmaking seek to question how we engage with our environment, how we repair and maintain it, and how we might live together with trouble (Haraway, 2016). Through this lens, my work explores entanglements between humans and non-humans, inviting reflection on co-existence within reciprocal and exhausted landscapes.