birbuçuk

BE LIKE WATER, MY FRIEND!

Water is the beginning of everything. Thales said so, Bruce Lee turned it into a philosophy of combat, Heraclitus reminded us that one cannot step into the same river twice, Lucretius spoke of water's perpetual transformation. But water is also a field of struggle — perhaps the most ancient of all. In this conversation, those sitting around the table — a hydrogeologist, a water rights activist, a pioneer of the environmental movement and three artists — approach water from different positions, yet all see the same thing: a world in which water can no longer flow freely.

An activist, recounting their own journey, says: "I am like water." A life that moves from landscape architecture to water rights campaigning. When the water is cut off because the bill has not been paid, the idea that water is a right becomes concrete. Water wars break out in Bolivia, taps go prepaid in South Africa, people take to the streets against water bills in Ireland. This is a global wave — but in Turkey it is not yet talked about enough. This is how the Water Rights Campaign was born.

It began with the demand that water be recognised as a fundamental human right. The UN's recognition of water as a human right in 2010 was an achievement — but an achievement that remained on paper. Because at the same time, the commodification of water accelerated: municipal water supplies were privatised, the bottled water industry grew exponentially. And this question hung in the air:

Water has the right to flow. We speak not only of people's right to water — but also of water's own right. Why should a stream not flow freely?

The right to water is not a concept that belongs only to humans; water itself has rights. To flow freely, to find its own path, to circulate underground, to reach the sea. Every time we imprison it in pipes, dams, bottles, and canals, we are in fact blocking our own veins. Ecuador's inscription of the rights of nature into its constitution, Bolivia's concept of Pacha Mama — these are signals from distant geographies, but they are searching for an answer to the same question: can water be owned? In Italy, a referendum halted water privatisation. In Greece, Ireland, everywhere, people are objecting to the commodification of water. But in Turkey this debate has not yet found a sufficiently broad footing. Water rights activism remains a niche within the environmental movement; yet every drop that flows from the tap is political.

VALLEYS IN REVOLT

A voice rises from the Black Sea coast. The story of the struggle against hydroelectric plants in the valleys of Arhavi is, in essence, a story of translation. On one side: the language of activists arriving from Istanbul and Ankara — law, environmental impact assessment, court rulings, cross-sectional flow measurements, minimum ecological flow rates. On the other: the language of the villagers — stream, fish, hazelnut, tea, bee, soil. To act as interpreter between the two is perhaps the hardest part of the struggle. But this translation is not one-directional; village women are also translating their knowledge, their bodies, their voices into the activists' language. And sometimes the most effective translation is a woman lying down in front of a bulldozer.

When Chernobyl's radiation fell on the Black Sea, a generation came to know cancer. The invisible poison that seeped into tea leaves, hazelnuts, and soil returned years later as disease. But that experience also taught something else: ecological issues pass through the body. The devastation wrought by a hydroelectric plant is like a metastasis. It brings down not a single organ, but the entire system. When pipes are laid along a stream, it is not only the water that is cut off — the fish disappear, the garden dries up, the bees dwindle, the hazelnut yield falls, young people leave the village. And when women lie down before bulldozers, it is not for a single stream they lie — it is for an entire way of life.

They wear hawk masks — both a symbol of resistance and a way of speaking as nature itself. Havva Ana stood before the bulldozer. They learned the law, they learned cross-sectional flow measurement, they memorised the minimum ecological flow rates, they went to the courts. None of this had been their aim in life; but struggle carries people to places they never expected. After a while — after the third or fourth panel — you find yourself thinking: "I could step in when Oğuz Hoca can't make it, I could present this." What if something like this were done in the village, at the tea collection point?

You don't have to be a victim of something if it concerns an ecological issue. The global nature of victimhood matters here. We must underline the fact that everyone has the right to speak on everything — and reject and disregard any use to the contrary.

And Cerattepe. At the very head of the valleys where the hydroelectric struggles are being fought, the place where cyanide pools are planned. If a colossal mining operation begins, even the hydroelectric plant debate will seem innocent by comparison. Because cyanide will spread from the headwaters of the groundwater system. Like medicine administered into a vein, it will circulate everywhere — from the toes to the brain. Whether or not the stream flows, it will be poisoned. The entire valley, the entire watershed, all of life.

The things we have left to save are running out, by the way. That is why I am in such a hurry, perhaps.

Lately, the struggle on the street has been getting harder. There is a growing isolation. At Gezi, everyone embraced one another warmly and readily; things arose naturally, collectively — slogans, words, jokes, small daily acts of solidarity. That was precisely what made Gezi: the convergence of struggles that had for years been waged separately, each in its own place — animal rights, environment, the right to the city — suddenly meeting. Now, that energy seems scattered, attention is divided, there are other attacks, and there is serious isolation. But do we not keep circling back and coming together again? Even these gatherings are an answer in themselves: sitting and talking, catching our breath, listening to one another.

BELOW GROUND, ABOVE GROUND

A hydrogeologist speaks of Mardin, of the Kızıltepe Plain. There, groundwater is being rapidly drawn down. Every year the wells go deeper, the water table falls. Through over-extraction, agriculture in the plain is pushed to the edge of collapse. When the privatised electricity company cuts off the power over unpaid debts, the pumps stop and the crop is about to dry out; and the farmers block the trade routes — the most elemental form of water protest. But behind this protest lies a deep despair: no one knows what to do when the well runs dry.

Where there is water, there is life. Where there is none, there is not.

Ostrom's commons theory takes on concrete form here: water belongs to neither state nor market — it belongs to everyone. But "belonging to everyone" must not mean "no one is responsible." There are models of self-governance in which communities can protect, share, and sustain their own water sources. System dynamics models, on the other hand, show how a common resource can turn into tragedy: in the end, when the wells run dry, everyone is made equal — in thirst. In the city, an entirely different picture.

You flush the toilet, you take a shower. Where does that water go? To treatment plants — vast structures operated for profit by private companies. From the sewers come sofa beds, truck tyres, refrigerators. And on rainy days, organised industrial zones discharge their chemical effluent into the sewers without pre-treatment. Because pre-treatment is a cost, and rain is an opportunity to evade inspection. We eat fish by the Bosphorus, without asking what water that fish has swum in. But even the word "sustainability" is being questioned.

What exactly are we sustaining? The confession of someone trained as an engineer is striking: "What we were taught was always: you do something, there must be an immediate output. But life is not that clear-cut. You must not think short-term, and rather than saying definitively 'this will lead to that', the point is: we have set out on a path, we are doing something."

Water will flow, it will find its way. I don't think we need to move so fast.

And when we say "local," we always think of the countryside — but our local is here too, this city. Istanbul has a structure that overflows the boundaries of urban geography. What can be done here? For people here to know the outside better, for people from outside to come here, for knowledge to flow in both directions. Throughout history, visual language has always been more powerful than the written or spoken word. How to bring art, the visual, the creative language together with social movements — how to expand it.

To speak of these things together, to nourish one another — perhaps to share examples that have never been present here.

NO MONEY, NO WATER

When did we start buying water? In the 1980s, if you walked into a corner shop and said you were very thirsty, the shopkeeper would give you a glass of water. Free. That water is now a commercial commodity, inside a PET bottle, behind a brand. This transformation happened so slowly we did not even notice. Just as the copper karakız pan was replaced by the non-stick Teflon pan; just as communal labour was replaced by individual consumption.

Convenience was offered; no one asked the price. An artist is working on this transformation: showing a culture in which even a tree is measured in money. Their real concern, however, is Istanbul's choked waters: streams that have been capped, placed under concrete, converted into sewage channels. In this city there are around eighty known streams, and no comprehensive work has been done on any of them. Where do they begin, where do they end, which still flows, which has long since died? Old maps of Istanbul show waterways; on the new ones, there is not even a trace. To uncover an underground stream — who will do it?

Those pipes and sewage channels flowing away from there — life could have flowed in their place. We chose, within this rubbish civilisation, to turn them into a dump.

Another artist sets up an installation called Maruz (Exposed) on the banks of the Kurbağalıdere. The stream no longer flows; it stinks. The artist wants to expose people to that smell, that sight. Water holds up a mirror to us; when we look into it, we see ourselves — but we do not want to see. And a third artist says that water is in the nature of cinema. The first filmmakers always wanted to shoot water — flow, timelessness, movement. "The timelessness and fluidity of water, and the fact that cinema is a little like that too — these things are connected." The viewer finds their own time within that flow. And perhaps cinema too is like water: it flows, transforms, disappears — but leaves a trace.

We need to work from concrete things. When there is something concrete, people begin to come and say: "Ah yes, this could work." Istanbul's eighty streams — this could be a concrete project. Where do they begin, where do they end, which ones are still alive? There are old maps, water maps; someone is a collector who has historical maps. Each of these streams will serve as a mirror: when we look, we will see water; in the water, we will see ourselves.

FACT, CONCEPT AND TULUM

Perhaps the most unexpected moment of this conversation is when cheese-making is mentioned. Someone describes how tulum cheese is made: "First we strain the cheese through muslin cloth. Then we press it, filling it tightly into a goatskin tulum, as much as it will hold. Then we bury it in the ground. After three months, it becomes a delicious cheese." This is a metaphor: if an academic does not wait long enough to interpret a fact, they become a prisoner of what they have heard. That is precisely why one must pack the fact tightly into the concept, bury it in the ground, wait for it to ripen. Both going somewhere as an outsider, and defining one's life through another practice — art, academia, activism — and trying to build a relationship from there: "it was something we wrestled with and couldn't quite get out of. That's why cheese, fact, concept, and tulum came together for us." The knowledge found in villages is hidden within nature and on the verge of being lost. Making a necklace from the threads that emerge from the root of a fern.

Threading wild strawberries on their stems — hard at the root end, soft where they join the plant — and wearing them around your neck. Watching a spider's nest for an hour, seeing the young eat the mother, and turning this into a saying passed down through generations: "As with the spider, these children will eat me." These are not things learned from documentaries; they are things you know by living them. There is four thousand years of culture there. Hemşinlis, Laz people, speakers of Romeyka. The relationships each of them has forged with water, soil, and plants are different — but all are nourished from the same root: living within nature, producing alongside it, learning from it. How, then, shall we carry this knowledge? On the one hand there is the idea of "bringing" — taking artists, musicians, theatre-makers to the villages, organising eco-festivals.

But on the other hand, "co-producing" is more accurate than "bringing." The visiting artist goes not to offer something but to get to know the experience there and to work alongside it. Seeing the village mill, joining the communal hazelnut picking, listening to songs in the evening — these are not tourist experiences but the ground of co-production. To look after the path, to repair the mill. There are already strong motivations in people who have a relationship with that geography. The point is for that relationship to stop being one-sided. There are people there who have already built a village house, grow everything themselves, live without shopping. There is much to learn from them. "We will go there, we will live what I have described. We will not expect results in the short term." But the denigration of the villager in Turkey has gone on for so long that people have become estranged from what they themselves know. Whatever belonged to the village became something to be ashamed of. Greenery, soil, copper pots, communal labour — all came to be seen as signs of "backwardness." Now there is an interesting reversal: things pushed out of the city are beginning to attract everyone's attention.

Touching the soil, growing one's own food, living with natural materials. But still as nostalgia, as knowledge; not as the thing itself. Things pushed out of the city are now what everyone calls "very interesting." Interesting as knowledge; remote as practice. People tried walking along the stream and collecting rubbish — an announcement was made in the village mosque, an event was organised, children joined in, a small vanload of rubbish was collected. But when people went back the following year, it was all the same again. It was done twice; by the third time, no one came. Because there are no eggs in the village any more; they are bought at the market in town. A car leaves every fifteen minutes, the watermelon seller comes, the fruit seller comes, the supermarkets reach all the way to the village. Global capitalism finds you even at the top of the mountain.

When we were small, there was no such thing as rubbish; everything was transformed: used, burned, turned into compost. Now everything arrives ready-made, in plastic packaging. And that plastic goes into the stream.

The people there have already witnessed developments in nature and drawn conclusions from them. Sayings have come from them. Can you imagine? There are so many things like that I take notes of, which I keep accumulating.

BELONGING

Living in three large cities and feeling no sense of belonging to any of them. İzmir, Ankara, Istanbul — each with its own practices, yet that bond of belonging cannot be forged with any of them. When the relationship to water is severed, the motivation to protect it disappears too. But in the village, in the place where one was born, water directly shapes life. This tension cannot be resolved, but it is named: belonging. "I am just one tiny person; there are more than twenty million people here. I cannot do it. But in the village, there is a place not yet polluted, one that can still be protected. And it is more vital: it directly affects the lives of those people." A voice joining from London offers another perspective.

There, one lives alongside flies, spider webs, insects. Even mass pesticide spraying is not done in the garden; they do not want to disturb the habitat of living things. The riverbanks are public; parks, sports grounds. "Where modernity is supposed to be further ahead, I am living a life closer to my life in Erzincan." The cleaner we become, the more polluted we are — and the more we pollute. There, every home has four separate bins; if you do not sort your waste, it is not collected. Sanctions and awareness-raising go hand in hand. Here, awareness campaigns come to nothing, and enforcement is absent. Large cities are role models, like it or not.

In all the TV series, all the films, everywhere, the urban lifestyle is held up as exemplary. And when those city dwellers throw their rubbish into the stream, the villager does the same — thinking "the water will carry it away." But water, too, has a capacity, and our rubbish now exceeds it. Out of the treatment plants come beds, toilet lids, toilet bowls. The policy-making power of municipalities is enormous; working with them is a necessity.

These are metastases. We need to focus on wherever the primary disease is located. It doesn't matter where we are.

And perhaps birbuçuk's root metaphor — ginger — finds its meaning here. Encounters that have no obligation to remain together, variable, not a burden on one another, yet arising from the same root. These conversations as the main root; the projects, panels, publications, and encounters that will sprout from them — like the small roots of ginger, they will each find their own way. Just like water finding its way. What matters is to meet, to get to know one another, and to catch our breath together. Rather than expecting immediate results, to trust the process. Not to think in the short term. We have set out on a path — perhaps sharing a meal, perhaps writing to one another, perhaps talking again, perhaps coming together in Istanbul, on the Black Sea coast, or in Mardin. Mutual exchange of knowledge and experience — both in art in particular and as a whole. Perhaps when we go there, we are even causing harm; one has to look at things from that angle a little. But when we go there, the people of that place saying — "look, people are coming, can you believe how curious they are, how valuable this turns out to be" — that too is a step.

Water will flow, it will find its way. But we, too, will let it flow.