POSTPONED
Roundtable Meetings:
World Water Day
Serpil Oppermann, Ifor Duncan, Aslı Uludağ, Banu Çiçek Tülü
Salt Beyoğlu
Flooded empty grave at the migrant cemetery in Sidiro (Evros), Greece
Photo: Stefanos Levidis and Ifor Duncan, 2019
Photo: Stefanos Levidis and Ifor Duncan, 2019
This program has been postponed.
Water Assemblies at Salt Beyoğlu culminates on World Water Day with a lineup of talks, presentations, discussions, and a sound performance.
The program features presentations by Serpil Oppermann, a leading scholar in the Blue Humanities; Ifor Duncan, a researcher and artist exploring political violence in river systems; and Aslı Uludağ, whose practice examines legal, architectural, and techno-scientific structures shaping human-environment relations. These presentations will be followed by a session where the leads of the five research strands within Water Assemblies share initial findings of their projects and reflect on how the work might evolve in the next stages. They will also engage in conversation with invited speakers and respondents about their respective projects. The program will conclude with a sound performance by Banu Çiçek Tülü, who will sonically transmit her research on water, dam construction, and environmental justice in Southeastern Turkey.
This free-admission program will be held in Turkish and English, with simultaneous translation available.
PROGRAM
13.30-14.30 Keynote Speech by Serpil Oppermann: “Thinking with Water in the Blue Humanities”
What if we learn to think with water, attuning to its geohistorical traces, its multiple temporalities, and its multispecies histories? How might our understanding of aquatic habitats change if we embrace water’s fluidity and porosity—concepts central to relational thinking? These questions raised by the field of the Blue Humanities encourage us to recognize ourselves as transient inhabitants of a world defined by flux, fostering deeper ethical engagements with water as “a matter of relation and connection.”
Fluid, unsettled, and shaped by forces beyond itself, water pulses with a vitality that defies containment. Its language of flow reveals complex relationalities between humans, water, and aquatic beings—both perilous and sustaining. Exploring stories of its exploitation and colonization demands transdisciplinary research at the intersections of marine sciences, the arts, and the humanities. The Blue Humanities thrives on this complementarity, generating multi-perspectival, less human-centered, and more ethical frameworks. In this introductory talk, Oppermann will illustrate how the field integrates scientific research and creative engagement to reshape objectifying views of aquatic life, using the Crochet Coral Reef project as a key example.
14.30-14.45 Q&A
14.45-15.00 Break
15.00-15.40 Media Lecture by Ifor Duncan: “Weaponizing a River”
This media lecture focuses on the case of the Evros/Meriç/Martisa River—the “land” border between Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria—and its production as a border technology. From its main course to its delta, this fluvial frontier is weighted with the crossings of asylum seekers and systematic pushbacks. The river-border technology incorporates the entire hydrology of the river ecosystem, from the deadly velocities of the central course to flood defense walls that mark the military buffer zone surrounding it, known as Zoni Asfaleias Prokalypsis (ZAP). State impunity is partly produced by the ZAP’s enfolding of the excess of floodwaters into the excesses of sovereign territorial power.
15.40-15.50 Q&A
15.50-16.30 Presentation by Aslı Uludağ: “Hydro-Geothermalisms”
The clustering of geothermal energy plants, thermal baths, and elite thermal hotels in Aydın, Manisa, and Denizli is a hydro-geopolitical entanglement rather than a geologically determined relation. At the core of this entanglement is the science of hydrogeology and its hybrid origins in Turkey—a tool imported from the West for territory and subject formation, but also rooted in local social natures and their modes of sense-making.
This presentation will trace the development of the geothermal energy field from the early 20th century into the neoliberal present, foregrounding embodied and social forms of local sense-making that have been appropriated or displaced in the process. Uludağ will share her field notes, where, guided by local resistance groups against geothermal energy development, geologists, and regulars of thermal baths, she searches for a hydro-geothermal common ground that might bring these disparate modes of sensing together and generate a grounded, submerged hydrogeology.
16.30-16.40 Q&A
16.40-16.50 Break
16.50-18.50 Research Presentations and Discussions
Aslıhan Demirtaş, Ezgi Hamzaçebi, Merve Anıl, Gökçen Erkılıç, Duygu Cihanger Ribeiro, Merve Bedir, Sibel Yardımcı, Ifor Duncan, Aslı Uludağ, Merve Yücel, Eylül Şenses
18.50-19.00 Break
19.00 Sound Performance by Banu Çiçek Tülü: “Inundated: Speculations on Water as a Site and a Paradigm”
In this performance, Tülü sonically transmits her research on water, dam construction, and environmental justice in Southeastern Turkey. Here, water appears as a paradigm through which one can articulate the cohabitations of sites and bodies. Drawing on water’s fluidity as much as how it can be blocked, manipulated, or instrumentalized, the performance revolves around the following question: If a work of art is situated within and around temporal and spatial bodies, can the manipulation of bodies that are not present be considered a means of representation?
Serpil Oppermann is a professor and director of the Environmental Humanities Center at Cappadocia University. She has served as the 7th President of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment (EASLCE) from 2016 to 2018. She is a member of the Advisory Council of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) and the PMLA Advisory Committee, where she is responsible for critical theory. Oppermann is the co-editor of Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities and the Bloomsbury book series The Blue Humanities, and the author of Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene (West Virginia University Press, 2023) and Blue Humanities: Storied Waters in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She has co-edited several book collections, including Material Ecocriticism (Indiana University Press, 2014), Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), and Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes (Lexington Books, 2021). She is currently co-editing The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Blue Humanities, forthcoming in 2026.
Ifor Duncan is a writer, artist, and postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council project “EcoViolence” at Utrecht University. His research focuses on political violence against communities in the context of degrading watery spaces, processes, and materialities, including river borders, mega-dam projects, and rivers as dynamic archives of genocide. He encounters these concerns through visual cultures, cultural memory, and a fieldwork practice that involves submerged audio-visual methods. Duncan holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was a lecturer from 2022 to 2024. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia between 2020-2022, and taught in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art.
Aslı Uludağ received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London. Through her research-based practice, she explores the legal, architectural, and techno-scientific structures that organize the relationship between humans and the environment and investigates the violence enacted through these processes. She proposes alternative modes of engaging with the environment through performative and interactive installations, workshops, and speculative narratives. The exhibitions she took part in include What Water Knows, Pilot Gallery, Istanbul (2022); 5th Istanbul Design Biennial (2020); A Handful of Rights, Pera Museum, Istanbul (2018); and Dissecting Signifiers, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago (2016). She is among the recipients of the Prince Claus Mentorship Award (2022) and co-founder of Practices of Attunement.
Banu Çiçek Tülü works at the intersection of music, sound art, and research, using music production and DJing as artistic tools for activism. Her work incorporates multi-channel video, analog synthesis, field recordings, sculpture, large textile installations, and weaving to explore feminist and queer sonic methodologies, where the female migrant body is present. She believes in the political potential of sound and music, which she utilizes as a tool for empowerment, particularly for minority groups, with an emphasis on BIPOC* and LGBTQI+ communities.
Merve Yücel is an architect and researcher working at the intersections of logistics, ecology, and infrastructure. She is a member of ATI, an artist collective that engages with urban environments. Her work spans spatial analysis, curatorial projects, and artistic research, investigating how material flows, extractive economies, and hydro-social dynamics shape contemporary landscapes and political ecologies. She is currently curating the year-long research project Water Assemblies at Salt. From 2011 to 2019, she served as the exhibition and project manager for the Istanbul Design Biennial, contributing to its critical discourse on design and architecture. She holds an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she examined shipbreaking as a process of environmental and economic speculation within global infrastructure networks.
Eylül Şenses is a programmer at Salt. She received her BA in Architecture from Middle East Technical University and her master’s degree in Architectural and Urban Studies from Kadir Has University. She was part of The Young Curators Group established as part of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial. She is one of the founding members of the urban studies cooperative Urban.koop and a co-founder of the ANATOPIA cooperative. Her interests include urban and rural commons, indigenous agricultural practices, spatial and environmental justice, and alternative pedagogies, with a particular emphasis on socially and politically engaged practices.
Water Assemblies at Salt Beyoğlu culminates on World Water Day with a lineup of talks, presentations, discussions, and a sound performance.
The program features presentations by Serpil Oppermann, a leading scholar in the Blue Humanities; Ifor Duncan, a researcher and artist exploring political violence in river systems; and Aslı Uludağ, whose practice examines legal, architectural, and techno-scientific structures shaping human-environment relations. These presentations will be followed by a session where the leads of the five research strands within Water Assemblies share initial findings of their projects and reflect on how the work might evolve in the next stages. They will also engage in conversation with invited speakers and respondents about their respective projects. The program will conclude with a sound performance by Banu Çiçek Tülü, who will sonically transmit her research on water, dam construction, and environmental justice in Southeastern Turkey.
This free-admission program will be held in Turkish and English, with simultaneous translation available.
PROGRAM
13.30-14.30 Keynote Speech by Serpil Oppermann: “Thinking with Water in the Blue Humanities”
What if we learn to think with water, attuning to its geohistorical traces, its multiple temporalities, and its multispecies histories? How might our understanding of aquatic habitats change if we embrace water’s fluidity and porosity—concepts central to relational thinking? These questions raised by the field of the Blue Humanities encourage us to recognize ourselves as transient inhabitants of a world defined by flux, fostering deeper ethical engagements with water as “a matter of relation and connection.”
Fluid, unsettled, and shaped by forces beyond itself, water pulses with a vitality that defies containment. Its language of flow reveals complex relationalities between humans, water, and aquatic beings—both perilous and sustaining. Exploring stories of its exploitation and colonization demands transdisciplinary research at the intersections of marine sciences, the arts, and the humanities. The Blue Humanities thrives on this complementarity, generating multi-perspectival, less human-centered, and more ethical frameworks. In this introductory talk, Oppermann will illustrate how the field integrates scientific research and creative engagement to reshape objectifying views of aquatic life, using the Crochet Coral Reef project as a key example.
14.30-14.45 Q&A
14.45-15.00 Break
15.00-15.40 Media Lecture by Ifor Duncan: “Weaponizing a River”
This media lecture focuses on the case of the Evros/Meriç/Martisa River—the “land” border between Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria—and its production as a border technology. From its main course to its delta, this fluvial frontier is weighted with the crossings of asylum seekers and systematic pushbacks. The river-border technology incorporates the entire hydrology of the river ecosystem, from the deadly velocities of the central course to flood defense walls that mark the military buffer zone surrounding it, known as Zoni Asfaleias Prokalypsis (ZAP). State impunity is partly produced by the ZAP’s enfolding of the excess of floodwaters into the excesses of sovereign territorial power.
15.40-15.50 Q&A
15.50-16.30 Presentation by Aslı Uludağ: “Hydro-Geothermalisms”
The clustering of geothermal energy plants, thermal baths, and elite thermal hotels in Aydın, Manisa, and Denizli is a hydro-geopolitical entanglement rather than a geologically determined relation. At the core of this entanglement is the science of hydrogeology and its hybrid origins in Turkey—a tool imported from the West for territory and subject formation, but also rooted in local social natures and their modes of sense-making.
This presentation will trace the development of the geothermal energy field from the early 20th century into the neoliberal present, foregrounding embodied and social forms of local sense-making that have been appropriated or displaced in the process. Uludağ will share her field notes, where, guided by local resistance groups against geothermal energy development, geologists, and regulars of thermal baths, she searches for a hydro-geothermal common ground that might bring these disparate modes of sensing together and generate a grounded, submerged hydrogeology.
16.30-16.40 Q&A
16.40-16.50 Break
16.50-18.50 Research Presentations and Discussions
Aslıhan Demirtaş, Ezgi Hamzaçebi, Merve Anıl, Gökçen Erkılıç, Duygu Cihanger Ribeiro, Merve Bedir, Sibel Yardımcı, Ifor Duncan, Aslı Uludağ, Merve Yücel, Eylül Şenses
18.50-19.00 Break
19.00 Sound Performance by Banu Çiçek Tülü: “Inundated: Speculations on Water as a Site and a Paradigm”
In this performance, Tülü sonically transmits her research on water, dam construction, and environmental justice in Southeastern Turkey. Here, water appears as a paradigm through which one can articulate the cohabitations of sites and bodies. Drawing on water’s fluidity as much as how it can be blocked, manipulated, or instrumentalized, the performance revolves around the following question: If a work of art is situated within and around temporal and spatial bodies, can the manipulation of bodies that are not present be considered a means of representation?
Serpil Oppermann is a professor and director of the Environmental Humanities Center at Cappadocia University. She has served as the 7th President of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment (EASLCE) from 2016 to 2018. She is a member of the Advisory Council of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) and the PMLA Advisory Committee, where she is responsible for critical theory. Oppermann is the co-editor of Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities and the Bloomsbury book series The Blue Humanities, and the author of Ecologies of a Storied Planet in the Anthropocene (West Virginia University Press, 2023) and Blue Humanities: Storied Waters in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She has co-edited several book collections, including Material Ecocriticism (Indiana University Press, 2014), Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), and Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes (Lexington Books, 2021). She is currently co-editing The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Blue Humanities, forthcoming in 2026.
Ifor Duncan is a writer, artist, and postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council project “EcoViolence” at Utrecht University. His research focuses on political violence against communities in the context of degrading watery spaces, processes, and materialities, including river borders, mega-dam projects, and rivers as dynamic archives of genocide. He encounters these concerns through visual cultures, cultural memory, and a fieldwork practice that involves submerged audio-visual methods. Duncan holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he was a lecturer from 2022 to 2024. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE) at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia between 2020-2022, and taught in the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art.
Aslı Uludağ received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London. Through her research-based practice, she explores the legal, architectural, and techno-scientific structures that organize the relationship between humans and the environment and investigates the violence enacted through these processes. She proposes alternative modes of engaging with the environment through performative and interactive installations, workshops, and speculative narratives. The exhibitions she took part in include What Water Knows, Pilot Gallery, Istanbul (2022); 5th Istanbul Design Biennial (2020); A Handful of Rights, Pera Museum, Istanbul (2018); and Dissecting Signifiers, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago (2016). She is among the recipients of the Prince Claus Mentorship Award (2022) and co-founder of Practices of Attunement.
Banu Çiçek Tülü works at the intersection of music, sound art, and research, using music production and DJing as artistic tools for activism. Her work incorporates multi-channel video, analog synthesis, field recordings, sculpture, large textile installations, and weaving to explore feminist and queer sonic methodologies, where the female migrant body is present. She believes in the political potential of sound and music, which she utilizes as a tool for empowerment, particularly for minority groups, with an emphasis on BIPOC* and LGBTQI+ communities.
Merve Yücel is an architect and researcher working at the intersections of logistics, ecology, and infrastructure. She is a member of ATI, an artist collective that engages with urban environments. Her work spans spatial analysis, curatorial projects, and artistic research, investigating how material flows, extractive economies, and hydro-social dynamics shape contemporary landscapes and political ecologies. She is currently curating the year-long research project Water Assemblies at Salt. From 2011 to 2019, she served as the exhibition and project manager for the Istanbul Design Biennial, contributing to its critical discourse on design and architecture. She holds an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she examined shipbreaking as a process of environmental and economic speculation within global infrastructure networks.
Eylül Şenses is a programmer at Salt. She received her BA in Architecture from Middle East Technical University and her master’s degree in Architectural and Urban Studies from Kadir Has University. She was part of The Young Curators Group established as part of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial. She is one of the founding members of the urban studies cooperative Urban.koop and a co-founder of the ANATOPIA cooperative. Her interests include urban and rural commons, indigenous agricultural practices, spatial and environmental justice, and alternative pedagogies, with a particular emphasis on socially and politically engaged practices.
