w/Aslıhan Şenel and Öykü Şimşek
Participants: Andreea Iliescu, Aslı Eylem Kolbaş, Beyza Ecem Yılmaz, Buket Samancı, Esra Yüksek, Ezgi Küçükpehlivan, Kaija Laurila, Lila Knape, Mariam Elhossein, Erinç Sarıbaş, Mübeccel Kaya, Nağme Pınar Aksu, Nazlı Giriftinoğlu, Robin Vleeschouwers, Sam Price, Samet Yılmaz, Seray Rusçuklu, Süleyman Kahya
Speculative Nematode Workshop is part of a long term research initiative which includes architectural design, artistic productions, and theoretical investigations both within and outside (but adjacent to) the university’s institutional confines, while both trying to activate its resources and challenge its limits. The initiative is kept alive through exchanges among academics, activists, architects, and graduate and post-graduate students in courses, architectural design studios, extracurricular workshops, and thesis research.
The overall research aims to question the ways in which architecture approaches the world with reductiveness, pragmatism, and detachedness. Drawing on the post-human feminist debate around collective and performative subjectivities, specifically Donna Haraway’s suggestion of ‘making kin’ and ‘becoming with’ (2016), this research aims to explore new collaborative, situated, and ethically political ways of making in architectural education and practice.
Speculative Nematode Workshop, in particular, allowed us to explore and map odd* instances of human and non-human collaborations through architecture in Istanbul. Like an overgrown beast in itself, Istanbul is rather an odd more-than-human conglomeration than the other of the natural, rural, and suburban, as often conceived and represented. In the Speculative Nematode Workshop, we acknowledged the existing odd more-than-human situations, but also sought collective and playful ways of narrating other ‘oddly possible ways of living together’ within a more-than-human world.
We suggest making and becoming with others to be able to survive in the contemporary disturbing times of ecological, economic, and political crises, all too harshly experienced in Istanbul. Instead of segregationist, competitive, heroizing and pragmatic grand narratives of the city of Istanbul, we care for egalitarian, sharing, collaborative and reproductive micro narratives.** For this, we visited those sites of odd more-than-human collaborations and explore site-specific ways of working through sketching, mapping, and storytelling. We question the ways in which the dominant narratives of topography of Istanbul is constructed and represented, for ex. in history books, mythologies, and museums. Furthermore we try to build oddly possible multiple topographies, of which we as researchers, become a part of through individual and collective bodily engagements. With an awareness and responsibility of our situated position, we try to reveal and put under scrutiny our capacities as researchers and makers. During the workshop, we constantly spatialized and materialized our research in forms of drawings, maps, texts, sounds, films, and three dimensional fabrications, those which perpetually remind us our own place in the world and this research, bodily limits, and relationships to others. This act of material-spatial practice points to the illusion of transparency*** in representations of topography in architectural drawings, maps, and models.
For more info: https://speculativenematodeistanbul.wordpress.com/about/