Ecologies of Making Worlds

The conference looks at projects of world-making and their particular relationality that emerged in the form of extraction, conflict, and destruction, as well as resistance, collective mourning, solidarity, companionship, and alternative forms of kinship in very specific geographies. the acknowledgment of heterogeneity. Heterogeneity appears in the ways worlds are made as well as in the modes of their relation. However, the world-making processes and the interrelations of different worlds are not harmonious and peaceful. 

The geographies and worlds the conference focuses on are the Upper Tigris region in Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey, which Kurds, Yazidis, and Assyrians inhabit. This region spans many worlds and has been subjected to many one-world world projects, such as extractivism, war, occupation, forced displacement, assimilation, or, in a nutshell, colonization. The region is named in multiple ways, and this implies that the region comprises many worlds that have been subjected to many one-world world projects, like, for example, extractivism, war, occupation, forced displacement, assimilation, or, in a nutshell, colonization. 

Arazi is an assembly initiated by researchers with diverse backgrounds: artists, academics, and architects. Despite the meaning of the term arazi (territory), which in Turkish refers to an empty space, a space that has lost its status of having significance, the assembly's practice reattributes agency to the particular arazi(s) to reveal and inquire about the coloniality inscribed in them. The colonization process in the region and, thus, Arazi's matter of concern, include forced displacement, privatization, extraction, and many forms of war, as well as the consequences of the very process of colonization that range from social and ecological destruction and extinction to forms of world-making practices in the regions. Nevertheless, the conference's scope extends beyond the specific conflict-ridden world makings in the Kurdish region in Turkey.

Departing from the practice of Arazi in a particular region, the conference intends to expand the discussion towards other geographies, artistic methodologies, and ways of engagement with geographies of conflict. Ecologies of Making Worlds brings together the work of Arazi Assembly, Angela Melitopoulos (artist) and Elizabeth Povinelli (anthropologist) along with Oliver Ressler‘s film The Desert Lives, which will be exhibited at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

THURSDAY, November 28 (room M20, Schillerplatz 3, 1010 Wien)

13 h - 13:30
Welcome and Opening by Sofia Bempeza, Nanna Heidenreich, Annette Krauss, Önder Özengi and Ruth Sonderegger.

13:30 h - 14 h
Pelin Tan: “Landscapes as Archives: Tigris Phenomenologies” (Keynote Lecture)
The non-extractivist practices in dispossessed and cohabited landscapes are about “survival-with” and “through” foraging, composting, preserving, landscaping, and burning ingredients, which propose to create together a relational phenomenology. What can artistic experiences reveal about, and how can they embody the voice of apocalyptic landscapes?

14 h - 14:30 h
Discussion of Pelin Tan’s Lecture moderated by Önder Özengi 

14:30 h - 15 h
Coffee break

15 h - 16 h
Short presentations by Mezra Öner and Mazlum Örmek from Arazi Assembly
Mezra Öner: “Conflict Urbanism”
This presentation explains spaciocide as a form of systematic erasure of space in neighborhoods that evolved to restricted areas, off-limits to the public, and under military blockade. In this context, researching such fields by trying to adapt to the fast-forward transformation of urban spaces caused by spaciocide and becoming a witness through visual archiving can be a methodology.

Mazlum Örmek: “In the Shadow of History: Forced Migration and Lost Memory in Sur, Diyarbakır”
Due to the conflicts in Sur, Diyarbakır, between 2015 and 2016 local residents were forced to migrate. In addition to the destruction of the region's historical and cultural heritage, the displacement of people from their homes created a tremendous social trauma. It caused the loss of memory and identity as Sur's demographic and social structure rapidly changed.

16 h - 17 h
Discussion of the presentations by Mezra Öner and Mazlum Örmek moderated by Pelin Tan

Break

18 h
Opening of the Exhibition “Ecologies of Making Worlds” at Universität für Angewandte Kunst
Room 306, Vordere Zollamtstrasse 7, 1030 Vienna.

18:15 h
Short presentation of Arazi Assembly’s recent publication by Andrew Hebert (editor)

FRIDAY, November 29 (room M20 from 10-15:00, room M13a 15:00-17:45; Schillerplatz 3)

10 h - 10:45 h
Short presentations by Leyla Keskin and Yelta Köm (from Arazi Assembly)
Leyla Keskin: “Ecological-Mourning”
Ecological mourning refers to the emotional and psychological grief that people experience due to environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, climate change, and the destruction of ecosystems. Ecological mourning is not only a pain felt at an individual level but also a grief shared across societies and cultures.

Yelta Köm: “Resisting Against Ecocide: Remapping Hasankeyf and Tigris”
How can we invent a decolonized visual representation of the existing maps of the lands that have been dispossessed and the traces left by extractivism? How does a land, surface, landscape, settlement, or dwelling resist ecocide? The presentation will present an alternative map of dispossession.

10:45 h - 11 h
Q&A Session (moderated by Önder Özengi)

11h - 11:15 h
Film screening: Oliver Ressler, “The Desert Lives”
On September 6, 2021, building machinery was blockaded at Vienna’s Hausfeldstraße metro station in a bid to stop construction of the Lobau freeway and the so-called “Stadtstraße” (city road) planned in conjunction with it. Austrian federal environment minister Gewessler subsequently ordered the cancellation of the Lobau project, but the Vienna city council opted to go ahead with the city road project anyway. In response, wooden structures were erected to ensure that the occupation could continue through the winter.

11:15 h - 11:45 h
Oliver Ressler: “Resisting Perdition in the Critical Transition”
The time for gentle demands to those in power and the attempt to achieve change through demonstrations seems to be over. As governments globally fail in shutting down climate-destructive operations, millions of people determined to prevent total planetary climate collapse are joining the climate justice movements and collectively take action. There were waves of mass civil disobedience in the past few years, and we will see more of it attempting to shut down coal mines, construction sites for LNG terminals, airports and harbors. In his films, Oliver Ressler has followed the climate justice movements for years. He shows events of mass civil disobedience and how the movements organize. His work questions the widespread habit of treating “art” and “activism” as distinct categories, when in practice they often overlap and cannot be separated.

11:45 h - 12:15 h
Panel Discussion with Leyla Keskin, Yelta Köm and Oliver Ressler, moderated by Önder Özengi

12:15 h - 13:15 h
Lunch break in Mensa

13:15 h - 14 h
Film Screening: “Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep,” by Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest known literary work in the world. Written in Mesopotamia more than five thousand years ago, it describes the journey of Gilgamesh, the ruler of one of the first historical metropolises, Uruk. Following the death of Gilgamesh’s best friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh embarks on a quest for immortality to avoid the same fate. Part god and part human, Gilgamesh encounters a varied cast of characters, from the Goddess Ishtar and the scorpion people, to Utnapishtim, who, like Noah, saved humanity from the Great Flood by building an arc. Filmed on the banks of the Tigris River near the ancient cities of Mardin, Hasankeyf, and Dara, Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan’s Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep (2022) retells the story of Gilgamesh as a journey through time and space inspired by Sumerian cosmology and the philosophy of Russian cosmism. Featuring an all-woman cast of actors from the Amed Theater in Diyarbakır and accompanied by an original score by Alva Noto, Gilgamesh is a meditation on questions of living, death, friendship, love, and immortality.

14 h - 14:30 h
Q&A with Pelin Tan moderated by Önder Özengi

14:30 h - 15 h
Coffee break, continuation of the conference in room M13a

15 h - 15:30 h
Angela Melitopoulos: “Cine(so)matrix” (Keynote Lecture via zoom)
Cine(so)matrix describes Melitopoulos' work as a cinematic matrix of movements and moving bodies. Cartography and non-linear narratives are forming her perception-apparatus, expressing inside-outside, subject-object and divisive relationships through micro-processual image techniques/productions. For Melitopoulos video technology simulates the roles of human memory and its intercerebral communications and brings to light the agency between images, their multiple connections and streams of consciousness. Her videos and installations explore memory, perception and the forming of collective historical awareness, in addition to mapping and the use of places in time, moving deeper into specific issues such as resistance to the scattering of migrant communities’ memory in Europe, territorial struggles against extractivism in Greece and the present of animist thought in technological societies and the  insistent forms against forgetting through repression and denial, exile, war and genocide, that are disseminated throughout the world. 

15:30 h - 16 h
Discussion of Angela Melitopoulos’s lecture, moderated by Sofia Bempeza

16 h - 16:30 h
Elizabeth Povinelli: Geontopower After Late Liberalism (Keynote Lecture via zoom)
This talk discusses the operation of extractive and consumptive capitalism after late liberalism. The talk examines geontopower across two formations of liberalism and capitalism, multicultural liberalism and global capital defining western self-definitions and practices from the 1970s through the end of the first decade of the 21st century and, whatever this new form of (liberal) capitalism emerging all around us. 

16:30 h - 17 h
Discussion of Elizabeth Povinelli’s lecture (moderated by Pelin Tan)

17 h - 17:15 h
Short presentation by Özge Çelikaslan from Arazi Assembly (via zoom)
Özge Çelikaslan: “Archiving Spaciocide: Video—Topographies”
This presentation delves into a micro-level video archive that documents ecological destruction, transformation, and degradation of the landscape caused by regional armed conflicts and extractivism. It explores how experimental video archiving practices can reveal the memory of the land, challenging traditional archival norms. It also examines the potential of video to document and resist ongoing processes of spatial erasure while addressing the broader role of archives of the commons in political struggles. 

17:15 h - 17:45 h
General discussion with Elizabeth Povinelli, Angela Melitopoulos and Arazi Assembly, moderated by Önder Özengi and Ruth Sonderegger

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