Forum:
Water Assemblies

Water Assemblies is the inaugural project of Forum, Salt’s research initiative that brings spatial practices into conversation with different fields of knowledge. The project’s first stage brings together five research groups to explore water’s relationships with bodies, geographies, infrastructures, language, and imagination.

Water Assemblies began in March 2025 with a three-week program that transformed Salt Beyoğlu’s ground floor into a shared research office. Workshops, talks, screenings, and performances brought the five research groups together, creating a space for encounter, discussion, and collective inquiry. The work continued through collective reading, mapping, listening, archival investigation, and fieldwork, with each group developing its own questions and methods.

Wetlands as Pedagogical Spaces brings critical wetland scholarship into dialogue with local contexts through collective reading and discussion. Its interconnected glossary gathers different ways of understanding wetlands and the relationships that shape them.
 
Wetness develops a water cosmology through fieldwork, explorations of language, and collective embroidery. Research in Istanbul and Ankara connects water infrastructures and everyday experience with bodily and sensory ways of knowing.

Sea Snotting or Nothing Less than Flamboyant in the Salty Waters of Istanbul takes the emergence of sea snot in the Sea of Marmara as a starting point for exploring relationships of care and reciprocity with water. Performative encounters, expeditions, wayfaring, and anecdote-making cultivate correspondences among participants, coastal communities, and other forms of life.

Istanbul Coastline Atlas Vol. X: Deep Listening/Deep Mapping extends an ongoing investigation of Istanbul’s changing coastlines through participatory mapping and deep listening. Archival materials, personal accounts, and underwater sound recordings contribute to an evolving atlas of the city’s relationships with water.

Speculative Fictions uses writing and shared making to explore water’s relationships with memory, displacement, ancient practices, and other possible worlds. Thirteen individual texts enter into conversation with collectively developed objects and an experimental video.

The website brings these research processes into wider circulation through glossaries, maps, texts, sound recordings, and visual materials. It offers points of entry into the groups’ questions and methods, alongside resources for further reading, discussion, and research. 

The website will be updated as the project continues into the next stage in 2027. 

Program: Eylül Şenses, Merve Yücel
Research Leads: Merve Anıl, Merve Bedir, Duygu Cihanger Ribeiro, Aslıhan Demirtaş, Gökçen Erkılıç, Ezgi Hamzaçebi
Editor: Ezgi Yurteri
Translation: Neylan Bağcıoğlu, Öznur Karakaş, Ezgi Yurteri
Design: İlayda Tunca
Web Application: Ari Algosyan

The research group “Wetness” is realized with the support of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.