Forum:
Water Assemblies
Salt Beyoğlu
March 4 – December 31, 2025
Salt launches Forum, a platform for transdisciplinary research and collaboration that brings together spatial practices with diverse fields of knowledge to address the urgencies of our time. Rooted in collective exploration, Forum approaches research as a growing, evolving process that opens up new possibilities. It aims to highlight not only the final outputs but also the research process itself as a collective act shaped by constant negotiation, discussion, and reconfiguration. Gathering researchers from various disciplines around a specific theme each year, the project’s first edition, Water Assemblies, comprises five research strands that explore water in relation to geographies, infrastructures, language, and imagination.
Water is life’s enduring foundation, connecting individual bodies to a vast hydrological continuum. Oceans, seas, and rivers are not mere resources to be owned or controlled but a fluid commons—a shared space of memory and connection, shaping economies, cultures, and ecosystems. Carrying the histories of exploitation, displacement, adaptation, and survival, water reflects the intertwined legacies of industrialization and globalization. From colonial networks to resource disputes, it reveals the impact of human activity and the dynamics of power.
As both a material and a metaphor, water’s relationship to abundance and scarcity exposes inequities embedded in how it is accessed, controlled, and distributed. From the privatization of aquifers to the strategic use of water as a border, from local communities’ struggles against industries polluting their rivers to solidarity movements advocating for water as a shared commons, this underscores the fractures in our systems of governance, mediating conflicts and alliances alike. It crosses borders, traverses infrastructures, and connects distant ecologies.
How does water—as a material force linking the local to the global, the human to the non-human—compel us to question the boundaries across disciplines and geographies? What models can it offer in relation to resilience, adaptation, and relationality, both as a repository of past struggles and a reservoir of potential? The research groups will address these questions from the perspectives of ecology, history, literature, and architecture, utilizing a range of methods—including critical cartography, archival studies, fieldwork, sound and performance-based inquiry, and speculative storytelling. They will explore water’s poetic, political, and ecological dimensions across multiple scales, from the infrastructures that govern its flow to the ways it permeates memory and narrative. Mapping shifting shorelines, documenting extractive processes, tracing submerged histories, and imagining speculative futures, these inquiries will reveal the frictions between industrial expansion, ecological vulnerability, and cultural memory. The year-long research will culminate in an e-journal in late 2025. The publication will include a shared glossary developed alongside the research process, serving as a tool for dialogue while exploring the significance of water across varying contexts.
Programmed by Merve Yücel together with Eylül Şenses from Salt, Water Assemblies will begin with a kick-off program between March 4-22 that transforms Salt Beyoğlu’s ground floor into a dynamic research office. This program will feature the first research outcomes and create a space for encounter, discussion, and collaboration. Public discussions, reading sessions, roundtable meetings, film screenings, and performances will accompany the workshops run by the research groups.
Research Strands
Istanbul Coastline Atlas Vol. X: Deep Listening/Deep Mapping
Researcher: Gökçen Erkılıç
Speculative Fictions
Researcher: Ezgi Hamzaçebi
Sea Snotting or Nothing Less than Flamboyant in the Salty Waters of Istanbul
Researcher: Aslıhan Demirtaş
Wetlands as Pedagogical Spaces
Researcher: Merve Anıl
Wetness
Researchers: Merve Bedir, Duygu Cihanger Ribeiro
The research group “Wetness” is realized with the support of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Water is life’s enduring foundation, connecting individual bodies to a vast hydrological continuum. Oceans, seas, and rivers are not mere resources to be owned or controlled but a fluid commons—a shared space of memory and connection, shaping economies, cultures, and ecosystems. Carrying the histories of exploitation, displacement, adaptation, and survival, water reflects the intertwined legacies of industrialization and globalization. From colonial networks to resource disputes, it reveals the impact of human activity and the dynamics of power.
As both a material and a metaphor, water’s relationship to abundance and scarcity exposes inequities embedded in how it is accessed, controlled, and distributed. From the privatization of aquifers to the strategic use of water as a border, from local communities’ struggles against industries polluting their rivers to solidarity movements advocating for water as a shared commons, this underscores the fractures in our systems of governance, mediating conflicts and alliances alike. It crosses borders, traverses infrastructures, and connects distant ecologies.
How does water—as a material force linking the local to the global, the human to the non-human—compel us to question the boundaries across disciplines and geographies? What models can it offer in relation to resilience, adaptation, and relationality, both as a repository of past struggles and a reservoir of potential? The research groups will address these questions from the perspectives of ecology, history, literature, and architecture, utilizing a range of methods—including critical cartography, archival studies, fieldwork, sound and performance-based inquiry, and speculative storytelling. They will explore water’s poetic, political, and ecological dimensions across multiple scales, from the infrastructures that govern its flow to the ways it permeates memory and narrative. Mapping shifting shorelines, documenting extractive processes, tracing submerged histories, and imagining speculative futures, these inquiries will reveal the frictions between industrial expansion, ecological vulnerability, and cultural memory. The year-long research will culminate in an e-journal in late 2025. The publication will include a shared glossary developed alongside the research process, serving as a tool for dialogue while exploring the significance of water across varying contexts.
Programmed by Merve Yücel together with Eylül Şenses from Salt, Water Assemblies will begin with a kick-off program between March 4-22 that transforms Salt Beyoğlu’s ground floor into a dynamic research office. This program will feature the first research outcomes and create a space for encounter, discussion, and collaboration. Public discussions, reading sessions, roundtable meetings, film screenings, and performances will accompany the workshops run by the research groups.
Research Strands
Istanbul Coastline Atlas Vol. X: Deep Listening/Deep Mapping
Researcher: Gökçen Erkılıç
Speculative Fictions
Researcher: Ezgi Hamzaçebi
Sea Snotting or Nothing Less than Flamboyant in the Salty Waters of Istanbul
Researcher: Aslıhan Demirtaş
Wetlands as Pedagogical Spaces
Researcher: Merve Anıl
Wetness
Researchers: Merve Bedir, Duygu Cihanger Ribeiro
The research group “Wetness” is realized with the support of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
