Conversation:
Agency of Nature, Nature as Infrastructure

Workshop II-III

“We focus on epistemology and knowledge production from within the plural cosmologies that create a certain place; on the one hand, understanding their contradictions, and on the other, trying to reproduce further vocabularies through the complexities of the place. We hope this allows us to rethink the infrastructures that impose certain forms of comprehension, experience, ways of living, and use of that place. We would like to learn from perspectives that undo extractivist epistemologies and reimagine water (and nature) as co-author of knowledge.”

Architect, author, and educator Paulo Tavares and architect Merve Bedir will be in conversation on how local knowledge, whether rooted or migrated, can inform practices envisioned as adaptive, relational infrastructures rather than imposed systems. Moderated by architect and researcher Merve Yücel, the discussion will explore the following questions: What are the ways of researching on/with the agency of nature, environment, cosmos, and commons, without reducing them to resources to be extracted, quantified, or managed? These could be methodologies that allow us to remain attentive to the contradictions embedded within a place—contamination, forced displacement, erasure, uneven development—while still learning from its knowledge systems. How can methodologies be both revealing violence and generative of different worlds? And how can we approach infrastructures that operate simultaneously at the household, neighborhood, river basin, and planetary scales in ways that connect local knowledge to planetary issues, or conversely, provincialize the planetary—bringing abstractions like “climate crisis” or “global infrastructures” back into the lived, contested terrains of the local?

This conversation is organized as part of “Wetness“—one of the five research strands in Water Assemblies—which explores the social and ecological architecture of water beyond colonial and patriarchal systems, reimagining it as a heterogeneous entity deeply connected to our bodies, collective practices, and everyday spaces. The free-admission program will be held in English with simultaneous translation to Turkish.

Paulo Tavares is an architect, author, and educator whose practice dwells at the frontiers between architecture, visual culture, and advocacy. Operating across multiple media, his work has been featured in various exhibitions, including the Oslo Architecture Triennial, Istanbul Design Biennial, São Paulo Biennial, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. With Gabriela de Matos, he co-curated Terra, which was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023. Tavares was also co-curator of the Chicago Architecture Biennial in 2019 and served on the advisory curatorial board of Sharjah Biennial in 2023. He is the author of several books addressing the colonial legacies of modernity, including Des-Habitat (2019), Lucio Costa era racista? (2022), Derechos no humanos (2022), La naturaleza política de la Selva (2024). He teaches at the Universidade de Brasília and leads the spatial advocacy agency Autônoma.

Merve Bedir is an architect and researcher whose work focuses on expanded infrastructures of hospitality and mobility, as well as collective intelligences and imaginaries of landscape. She holds a PhD from Delft University of Technology and a BArch from Middle East Technical University. She has taught at the University of Hong Kong, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Columbia GSAPP. Her projects were reviewed in The Guardian, The Avery Review, and Frieze. Bedir has taken part in BAK (Utrecht, 2025 and 2023), Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (New York, 2023), Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), Architecture Biennale of São Paulo (2017), and several editions of Istanbul Design Biennial and Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen. She is a co-initiating member of Aformal Academy and Black Book Assembly in Pearl River Delta, Kitchen Workshop in Gaziantep, and Center for Spatial Justice in Istanbul.

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. From 2011 to 2019, Yücel served as the exhibition and project manager for the Istanbul Design Biennial, contributing to its critical discourse on design and architecture. She received her 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. Currently, she is co-curating the long-term research project Water Assemblies at Salt.

The program is realized with the support of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Consulate General of Brazil in Istanbul, and Instituto Guimarães Rosa.