Reclamation Landscapes
April - September 2024
IZMIR
Corrective Landscaping Works comprise of three landscaping cases revealed as a result of decisions that were identified, intersected and overlapped during the field & archive research and literature review phases of the Crop Project. It aims to tell the story of the marshes, dunes and mountains in Anatolia, which were cultivated by the ideal of modernization, which extends from the Late Ottoman to the Early Republic Era and transforms the relations established with the environment.
The Crop Project began by focusing on the environmental, cultural and social crops of industrial agriculture practices in Çukurova. Its literature review, archive and field studies were carried out in December 2022. Human and non-human testimonies were traced, meetings were organized. It started in Çukurova with the support of CultureCIVIC. The materials for the placements accumulated in the meanwhile. Visits to the plains facing the Levant, interviews, marches, photo collections discovered in archives, faces and practices from the past and edicts considered as turning points in environmental history formed a route for the placements.
Placements focus on the development- and profit-oriented shaping process of natural landscaping processes, which are controlled and functionalized by improvement processes. Each placement focuses on a single correction process: Drying the swamp, finishing the dune and sowing and mowing mountains into vineyards. Reclamation Landscapes installations invite audience to trace the common sense in these processes, as well as the view of the environment, and to look at transformation stories of endangered ecologies with a perspective that emphasizes ecology and the diversity it contains.
Representation of nature as an immense and exploitable national resource is not a choice specific to the present day. The current relationship between holders of power and the has its origins in many correction processes that were learned by the 19th century Ottoman Empire by observing the West in the Ottoman Empire, and have been accelerated by the national modernization movements following establishment of the Republic of Turkey. The placements of the Corrective Landscaping Works project lead to rethinking the finishing processes that restrict the existence of the rivers, dunes and mountains. With a wide variety of artistic narratives, it aims to raise awareness on the ways of association of the human and the non-human, the practices of shaping the environment and the inherent violence, and to serve as a call for the future pursuits of rights in nature.
