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Gökçen Erkılıç, Visiting Researcher, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, will present "Cartographic Narratives on Shaping the Land and Water Divide in Istanbul."
Gökçen Erkılıç, Visiting Researcher, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, will present "Cartographic Narratives on Shaping the Land and Water Divide in Istanbul."
Gökçen Erkılıç works with forms of representation in digital media of human and environment relations, particularly interested in the coastlines and waterscapes in Istanbul and Anatolia. In the region she looks for how land and water relations are re-made with material shaping of coastal landscape through urbanization processes and how this affected political ecological dissent at a broader historic evolution in return. Using digital media, she produces cartographic videos particularly using aerial photographs, maps, maritime charts, river surveys, infrastructural project plans, news and film excerpts on the alteration of material flows in time. Her latest video work This is not a line: Coastline as ecotone/flatland/landfill/whirlpool is exhibited in various art collections and events. Her latest article is entitled “For Thousands of Years, Waters Delineated the Destiny of This City and Its People”: A Material Cartography of the Coastlines and the Shaping of Istanbul’s Port Geography. Her Coastliners Lab is a nomadic academic project where she teaches on the theory of ecology, urban theory and cartographic imagination; and instructs urban and architectural design studios on critical coastal conditions. She regularly writes on coastlines at Manifold.
In 2020 she founded Go.St as her research and design practice. Previously, she has worked in architectural exhibitions including 15th Architectural Exhibition, La Biennale Venezia, Pavilion of Turkey with project “Darzana: Two Arsenals, One Vessel.” She coordinated various urban design projects at as a conceptual designer and researcher at Teget Architecture, and collaborated various teams for design competitions. She graduated from Middle East Technical University Department of Architecture (2010). She holds a master degree from Istanbul Bilgi University (2012) and a PhD from Istanbul Technical University (2019), and was a fellow in Istanbul Studies Center (2017). Her doctoral thesis was entitled “This is not a line”: Critical Delineation of the Coastline in Istanbul.” She was born in Ankara in 1988, and she lived in Istanbul since 2010.
Register in advance. Visit the event page for more information.
Contact: elizabethflanagan@fas.harvard.edu