[NOTE: Only the first and last pages are attached here due to copyright-related limitations] Examining cases from the city of Diyarbakır in southeast Turkey, this chapter discusses the role of 'witness-sites' within... more abstract[NOTE: Only the first and last pages are attached here due to copyright-related limitations] Examining cases from the city of Diyarbakır in southeast Turkey, this chapter discusses the role of 'witness-sites' within discourses on the 'Kurdish Question'. The notion of 'witness-sites', as developed and employed in this chapter, refers to sites that once witnessed and are thus now associated with sociopolitical atrocities. As such, these sites have been subject to memorialization projects—both those that have been implemented and those that have not materialized. The paper discusses witness-sites as spaces where different, often conflicting, political discourses regarding modern-day Turkey’s Kurdish question become manifest through and in relation to the past. It argues that these sites present a significant challenge to established theories on the relationship between site and memory, in that they effectively help overlap different temporalities and blur the boundaries between what is often discussed binarily as ‘the past’ and ‘the present’. For, on-going rights-seeking processes mean that witness-sites owe their importance not only to their past-witnessing, but also to their present-day role as a quasi-legal forum for the elicitation of new evidence and bodily narration of testimonies.

Peace and Conflict Studies, Architecture, Museum Studies, History and Memory, Anthropology of space, and 23 more

This short paper is the script of a talk I was invited to give in summer 2014 in Hamburg as part of the art event Floating Volumes #4. It looks into the urban-architectural context in which the Gezi Park and Taksim Sq... more abstractThis short paper is the script of a talk I was invited to give in summer 2014 in Hamburg as part of the art event Floating Volumes #4. It looks into the urban-architectural context in which the Gezi Park and Taksim Square events came about and the ways in which the conflict around the protests unfolded through the built environment.

Architecture, Urban Planning, Urban Studies, Protest, Public Sphere, and 7 more

Architecture, Museum Studies, Memory Studies, Anthropology of the built environment, and Politics of Memory

To see the article in full, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ijia.5.2.359_1 This article discusses recent Occupy-style protests that took place at sites of heritage quality in Turkey. It looks into the material... more abstractTo see the article in full, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ijia.5.2.359_1 This article discusses recent Occupy-style protests that took place at sites of heritage quality in Turkey. It looks into the material and discursive ways in which the protests have negotiated possession, dispossession and belonging across time. Cultural heritage is more often than not understood as a ‘thing’ belonging to a particular proprietor (regardless of heritage’s intangibility or the proprietor’s collectivity or anonymity). It is regulated as such not just on the level of nation states but also globally. The examples discussed in this article, however, have seen much of this association thrown into disarray by shifting focus, instead, to vulnerability and dispossession. This shift of focus invokes the following two forces: (1) the violent pasts and their role in the production of ‘cultural heritage’ as such, and (2) the risk of earthquake and its prompting of negotiations over the use, ownership and physical layout of heritage-quality sites. What sorts of political agency might heritage enable when it is experienced and conceptualized through vulnerability and dispossession? What might such experience and conceptualization mean for the temporalities and human–nonhuman hierarchy associated with conventional understandings of belonging in and through heritage? The article explores these questions through two cases: Gezi Park and its environs in Istanbul, and the Tigris Valley (including Hewsel Gardens and Mount Kırklar) in Diyarbakır.

Social Movements, Architecture, Violence, Cultural Heritage, Land and Property Development, and 46 more

This essay discusses a set of inadvertent encounters with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century persecution of the Ottoman Armenians in light of Rosalind Morris' notion of " accident, " which implicates the ... more abstractThis essay discusses a set of inadvertent encounters with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century persecution of the Ottoman Armenians in light of Rosalind Morris' notion of " accident, " which implicates the traumatic event as not just a distant, isolated and immutable past but also one that constantly crops up in the present and runs the risk of so doing in the future. The essay draws attention to the multiplicity of the actors and settings involved in the said encounters: bones, trees, living people, mountains, stones, buildings, rivers, fault lines, and valleys. In these encounters, the temporal pervasiveness characteristic of Morris' notion of accident is therefore coupled with its spatial counterpart as it stretches above, below, through and across the geography concerned. This twofold pervasiveness is a call to begin to develop a new notion of truth about the persecution of the Ottoman Armenians—one whose contemporary resonance complicates sequentiality and builds on an entanglement of human-inflicted and natural forms of destruction and violence.

Geography, Ottoman History, Armenian Studies, Actor Network Theory, Genocide Studies, and 24 more

This essay discusses Turkey’s state television TRT’s factual series Bear Witness (launched in November 2015 and ongoing), which covers the most recent wave of operations by counter-terrorism units in urban centers acr... more abstractThis essay discusses Turkey’s state television TRT’s factual series Bear Witness (launched in November 2015 and ongoing), which covers the most recent wave of operations by counter-terrorism units in urban centers across the country’s southeast. The series is marked by a bold claim to truthful and impartial coverage, which it seeks to undergird by way of a stylistic and methodological combination of the genres of true crime, citizen journalism, and military surveillance. Bear Witness provides insight into how the state might reconceive sovereignty through televised propaganda in an age when both warfare and its reporting have become ubiquitous and instantaneous: against a spatial and temporal exterior presented as having dynamic boundaries that constantly threaten to engulf the interior across which the state seeks to hold sway.

Military Science, Violence, Kurdish Studies, Political Violence and Terrorism, Citizen Journalism, and 5 more

This short paper emerges from a talk I gave in summer 2014 in Vilnius, which was commissioned by Architekturos Fondas. It aims to begin to critically reflect, through a specific case in Istanbul, on the way in which t... more abstractThis short paper emerges from a talk I gave in summer 2014 in Vilnius, which was commissioned by Architekturos Fondas. It aims to begin to critically reflect, through a specific case in Istanbul, on the way in which the concept of "public" has come to be employed in relation to large-scale architectural projects.

Architecture, Urban Planning, Turkey, Biopolitics, Modern Turkey, and 8 more

Design, Architecture, Urban Politics, Space and Place, Anthropology of space, and 3 more

Kentsel Dönüşüm, Mimarlık, Sanat, Kent ve Ekoloji, Kentleşme Ve çevre Sorunları, and 11 more

The host Aslı Kırbaş talked to Sinan Logie from Bilgi University (TR), Gül Köksal from Kocaeli University (TR) and myself about the two events the three of us co-organized the last week of May in Istanbul, which were ... more abstractThe host Aslı Kırbaş talked to Sinan Logie from Bilgi University (TR), Gül Köksal from Kocaeli University (TR) and myself about the two events the three of us co-organized the last week of May in Istanbul, which were themed "the sociality of architecture," and inspired by the debates around this year's Venice Architecture Biennale and Turkey's Pavilion therein. More information on the events in question can be found via this link (in Turkish): http://xxi.com.tr/haberler/bir-pavyon-iki-etkinlik. My contribution to the programme starts after 31:18.

Kentsel Dönüşüm, Mimarlık, Kentleşme Ve çevre Sorunları, Kentleşme, Kentsel Muhalefet, and 2 more

Mimarlık, Kentsel Bellek, Kültürel Bellek, and Kolektif Bellek

Architecture, Museum Studies, Political History, and Memory Studies

My conversation with Ines Weizman that takes as its departure point the Routledge book "Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence," which she edited in 2014.

Eastern European Studies, Architecture, Central and Eastern Europe, Central European Dissidence, Soviet Dissidents, and 6 more

Review of the book Urban Maps. Note: due to copyright restrictions, only the title page has been uploaded. Please use the following link to access the full review: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2015.1106881

Architecture, Narrative, Urban Planning, Urbanism, Built Environment, and 4 more

The School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, and The AGBU Nubar Library, Paris, are delighted to announce a panel discussion and launch of the Special Art History Edition of Études arméniennes contemporaines... more abstractThe School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, and The AGBU Nubar Library, Paris, are delighted to announce a panel discussion and launch of the Special Art History Edition of Études arméniennes contemporaines Towards Inclusive Art Histories: Ottoman Armenian Voices Speak Back Date: Tuesday 26 April Time: 6.30 pm Venue: Keynes Library School of Arts Birkbeck College 43 Gordon Square London, WC1 This event is supported by Armenian Institute Gomidas Institute Ottoman Pasts, Present Cities: Cosmopolitanism and Transcultural Memories AHRC Research Network Programme of Armenian Studies Despite a focus on art history in its widest sense, the concerns raised in Issue 6 of Études arméniennes contemporaines offer critical reflections upon the manner in which the heavily politicized seas of the Ottoman historical past are navigated by historians of all stripes. The five revisionist essays published in this volume, and presented by their authors, advocate, collectively and individually, new types of methodologically and empirically sound histories that challenge misconstrued and misrepresented historical pasts, and critique the reductive projections of dominant nationalist/nation-centric or Ottomanist historiographies. Furthermore, they introduce into the debate hitherto silenced voices that have thus far been deliberately excluded from history. Two further presentations offer the personal reflections of two working artists on their own Ottoman historical pasts and presents.

Art History, Ottoman History, Armenian Studies, Middle East Studies, Ottoman Studies, and 7 more

22 May 2015 @ University College London An interdisciplinary symposium on geographical, architectural and visual-cultural implications regarding various forms of protest, refuge and conflict in and around the Middl... more abstract22 May 2015 @ University College London An interdisciplinary symposium on geographical, architectural and visual-cultural implications regarding various forms of protest, refuge and conflict in and around the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This event is organized by Tom Snow and Eray Çaylı, and supported by the Bartlett School of Architecture Research Fund and the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Art (CSCA) at the History of Art (HoA) department, UCL. Venue: Seminar Room 3 at the HoA department at 20-21 Gordon Square, WC1H 0AG. (The entrance to 20 - 21 is at at the back of the block of buildings. To get to the back, pass through the gated area next to the Bloomsbury Theatre and stay left. The block of buildings will be on your left). PROGRAMME: 1:00-1:15: Introduction by the co-organizers 1:15-3:15: Panel 1 - chaired by Alan Ingram (UCL Geography): • Özden Şahin (Media & Comm. dept., Goldsmiths College) - Rethinking Violence through Biopolitical Spaces • Tom Snow (UCL HoA) - Gezi and Protest Aesthetics in Globalisation • Lorenzo Pezzani (Bartlett) - Liquid Traces, Mobile Subjects: Investigating the Deaths of Migrants at the EU's Maritime Frontier 3:15-3:45: Tea & coffee break 3:45-5:45: Panel 2 - chaired by Peg Rawes (Bartlett): • Eray Çaylı (UCL HoA & Bartlett) - Heritage amidst Protest, Protest amidst Heritage: Property, Belonging, Temporality • Samar Maqusi (Bartlett) - Spatial Violations: on the *political* inside the Palestine refugee camp • Adrian Lahoud (Bartlett) - Fallen Cities 5:45-6:00: Short break 6:00-6:30: Final comments and questions regarding both panels 6:30-7:30: Wine reception

Social Movements, Oceanography, Visual Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Architecture, and 12 more

History, Design, Art, Architecture, Identity (Culture), and 5 more

More Info: [Should you wish to see the full paper, please contact me.]

Design, Art, Corporate Social Responsibility, Interdisciplinarity, Graphic Design, and 4 more

Design, Public Art, Design Theory, Politics, Environmental Sustainability, and 6 more

A short piece written for the third, defiance-themed, issue of the Bartlett School of Architecture's magazine Lobby. For more on Lobby, see http://bartlettlobby.com/

Architecture, Urban Politics, Politics, Urban Studies, Urbanism, and 5 more

Film Studies, Gentrification, Urban Studies, and film Reviews

Publication Date: Jun 1, 2014

Publication Name: M-est

Business Ethics, Architecture, Megaprojects, and Disaster Culture

More Info: The attached file is the unedited version of the online article that can be accessed via the link provided.

Publication Date: May 27, 2014

Publication Name: Failed Architecture

Architecture, Politics, Urbanism, Turkey, Modern Turkey, and 4 more

Tarih, Epistemoloji, Diyarbakir, Jeoloji Ve Arkeoloji, Osmanlı Tarihi, and 10 more

Mimarlık, Sürdürülebilirlik, şehir Ve Bölge Planlama, çevre Koruma, Kent ve Ekoloji, and 8 more

Kentsel Dönüşüm, Mimarlık, Göç, şehir Ve Bölge Planlama, Tasarım, and 7 more

Kentsel Dönüşüm, Mimarlık, Mimarlik Tarihi, Konut, Mimari Temsil, and 22 more

Kentsel Dönüşüm, Mimarlık, Kurumsal Sosyal Sorumluluk, Kentsel Tasarım, Sosyal Devlet, and 4 more

Mimarlık, Istanbul, şehir Ve Bölge Planlama, Kentsel Doku ve Şehirsel Büyüme Biçimi, Kent Antropolojisi, and 21 more

Mimarlık, şehir Ve Bölge Planlama, Kentsel Planlama, Kentleşme, Kentsel Muhalefet, and 2 more

Mimarlık, Tasarım, Heykel, Anıtsal Yapı, Kamusal Sanat, and 3 more

Tasarım and Türkiye'de Teknoloji ve İnovasyon

Semiotics, Architecture, Mimarlık, Göstergebilim, and Tasarım

More Info: Tasarım, Radikal'in her ayın ilk cumartesisi yayınlanan mimarlık ve tasarım ekidir.

Publication Name: Tasarım

Architecture, Urban Planning, Urban Studies, Urban Ruins, Kentsel Dönüşüm, and 3 more

Architecture, Street Art, Art and Activism, Design activism, Nonviolent Civil Resistance, and 1 more

More Info: Tasarım, Radikal'in her ayın ilk cumartesisi yayınlanan mimarlık ve tasarım ekidir.

Publication Name: Tasarım

Design, Architecture, Urbanism, Urban Design, and Nationalism and Decolonization

More Info: Tasarım, Radikal'in her ayın ilk cumartesisi yayınlanan mimarlık ve tasarım ekidir.

Publication Name: Tasarım