Active Landscapes

December 2023 - November 2024
DİYARBAKIR

Inspired by the book “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins,” the “Active Landscapes” project promotes cultural dialogue by emphasizing the cultural landscape of Hevsel Gardens, an important part of Diyarbakır. Taking living things into its focus, the project aims to look at and visualize forms of relationship in this field from different perspectives, thereby contributing to the conservation and rediscovery of the field. Hevsel Gardens is a historical and natural area that is considered as lungs of the city due to its atmosphere, landscape, biodiversity and endemic plants. However, the interventions by the ruling power in Hevsel Gardens and Dicle River cause destruction. Such interventions can remain in the dark due to their intensity and chaos. The goal of the project is to expose these destructive acts by the ruling power and encourage rethinking the relations with the environment. The project was shaped in two different phases: The first phase includes observation and analysis of the area with walking workshops to be organized in the project site. This phase aims to explore the interactions of the living things in the area and blur the boundaries, observing and documenting human interventions. The second stage aims to produce biomaterials using the documents collected during the walking workshops and the natural materials obtained from the area. The workshop aims to transform the relationship between the natural and biological contexts and our body, identities and environments into materials, thereby creating an intimate and personal biomaterial narrative.

Rozelin Akgün

Rozelin Akgün (1995, Diyarbakır) graduated from Mustafa Kemal University, Faculty of Architecture, Department of Landscape Architecture (2019). Akgün is known as a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. She focuses on biological cycles and biomaterials in her research, introduces social, cultural, economic and psychological contexts into her creative process, and is interested in the theme of materials that transform into organic matter and other forms. Through practice-based experimental research methods, Akgün aims to explore the relations between humans and the natural world and, through material research projects, she aims to develop more instinctive relationships and to blur the boundaries between bodies and their surroundings. In 2022, she exhibited her material archive called “Bioarchive” within the scope of an open studio at the local art venue Loading, which included bioplastic samples. In the same year, she participated in the group exhibition at the A4 workshop with her work titled “Anthropogenic mass.” In 2023, she attended the symposium “Entangled Archives of Wars: Experiences, Images, and Politics of Representation” in Sarajevo as a speaker together with her works. Continuing her experimental biomaterial archive studies, Akgün lives and creates in Diyarbakır.

This page is published on 8 December 2023.