birbuçuk

THE TWO SIDES OF THE BORDER

When we say border, the first thing that comes to mind is a line — a thin line on a map. But the moment you try to cross that line, you understand: a border is not a line, it is an experience. It leaves its mark on the body, is transmitted across generations, changes the path of water, rewrites the memory of the land. The border is not only a geographical fact but also a legal fiction, a military apparatus, an economic machine, a psychic wound, an identity category, and a bodily experience — all at once.

Movement across borders is not evenly distributed. Some move freely — visa privilege, the mobility of capital. Others are impeded or criminalised — migrants, the poor, racialised bodies. The question is always the same: who moves? Under what conditions? With whose permission?

My grandfather was exiled. My father's side of the family became refugees. I grew up with a fear I could not name. Borders passed through bodies, through generations.

To understand border politics, one must first ask what a border does. Who drew this border? Is it real, or imposed? What does this border make possible, and what impossible? Borders do not only restrict movement; they determine who becomes what. A "border citizen" is a different kind of being from an unbounded subject. Borders produce categories — refugee, migrant, citizen, Other.

Every narrative of border-crossing reaffirms the border itself. "I crossed the border" or "I was stranded at the border" — both consolidate the reality of the border. But what if we spoke of the commons instead? For thousands of years, people lived on shared lands. It is only in the last fifty to five hundred years that these lands have been nationalised, fenced, bounded. When we say "migrant," we are really speaking of people whose commons have been stolen — not of people who are fundamentally displaced. To recover the memory of what was common before borders disrupts their naturalness.

THE RAIN PRAYER AND JUSTICE

Someone who speaks of the limits of journalism takes us somewhere quite different: to the drought-stricken villages of Anatolia. What the research into the rain-prayer tradition brings to light is far more than a meteorological ritual.

Food is gathered, cooked together, brought to the poorest family in the village. An old man says: 'Perhaps for the sake of these small animals, God will accept our prayer.' This is justice not as a concept but as lived practice. The sacralisation of mutual dependence.

The rain prayer is in fact a border practice — it stands at the border between the visible and the invisible, the scientific and the spiritual, the individual and the collective. The person researching it came upon the ritual while collecting climate news. Their place is somewhere between professional journalism and activism, between gathering clear information and living with uncertainty. They cannot stay within the professional borders of the news world, because what they have to tell spills over those borders. They collect clear information about walls, dams, conflicts — but always carry an ambiguity about what is to be done with it.

In moments of crisis there is clarity — a wall, a dam, a conflict; visible, documentable. Crisis generates projects. But in times outside of crisis, ambiguity covers everything and the feeling of dispersion grows. How does one stay with that ambiguity? The absence of resolution, if it is not paralysis, is perhaps a field of possibility. One must resist the urge to resolve too quickly. Moving with ambiguity — but bringing others in, and keeping ambiguity from turning into paralysis.

REMAINDERS AND WITNESSING

Someone who practises video activism explains that documentation is not a simple act of recording. Working with migrants, this person began to take an interest in remainders — those left behind, those who are not counted, those left outside the official narrative. Remainders, beyond their status as an economic concept, represent the people, stories, and experiences that are rendered invisible.

At a certain point, we were no longer documenting borders — the borders crossed us. The gap between the filmed image and the lived experience became the actual material. We became what we were working on.

Documentation participates in the act of world-making. It renders erased actors visible. But documentation itself also draws a border — between this side and the other side of the camera. Who speaks? Who listens? In whose interest? These questions constitute both the power and the ethical responsibility of witnessing.

The concept of "remainders" here is far more than an economic term. It is every experience, every story, every person left outside the official narrative. The act of collecting — archiving, redistributing — is a practice carried out without any claim to authorship. To be a collector is not to possess but to transmit. And this transmission is itself a border violation: it pushes at the border of what is deemed valuable, the border of what makes news, the border of who has the right to speak.

INVERTED MAPS

An artist speaks of the effect of turning the world map upside down. Africa at the top, Europe at the bottom. The same geography — a different response from the nervous system. This visual inversion exposes how artificial our normalised divisions are.

White feathers at the entrance — softness, care, beginning. The last rows are black — unease. Visitors moved through the feathers towards the stars. The cosmic perspective made borders absurd.

Artistic practice is not the illustration of concepts. It is a way of producing knowledge that no other method can reach. Inverted maps, feather installations, breath recordings — these are not aesthetic preferences but epistemological interventions.

For an artist who comes from a refugee family, the border has never been an abstract concept. Raised in İzmir, this artist was never quite "from there." The experience of displacement carried within the family is a constant reminder of the border's bodily dimension. The work "Strange Fruit" turns the world upside down. The southern hemisphere above, the north below. It is the same planet, but when the perspective changes, the nervous system goes into shock. Our normalised hierarchy is nothing more than a cultural choice that puts the north on top.

Working at the border between different modes of thought: walking, breathing, collecting-witnessing, inverting. All of them ask the same question: when borders shift, how do we know differently?

WHAT IS CALLED A SECURITY DAM

Someone walking in the Northern Forests, along the city's edge, follows the city's borders by tracing its quarries. The more stone is extracted, the further the border shifts. We are all complicit in moving that extraction line.

Along the border in Şırnak and Hakkari, eleven dams were planned and some of them built — dams with zero water-management function. Entirely military. The concept of 'security dam' does not exist in world literature.

Water knows no borders, but borders define water. As dams alter the flow of water, they also redefine the living conditions of every creature in that region. Ecological boundaries precede and structure political ones. You cannot separate water, geology, and ecology from political borders — borders reshape ecosystems. A water laboratory project travels across different regions, bringing together local actors — farmers, engineers, activists, researchers — around questions of water. The role of facilitator matters: not to be the expert, but to create the space for different people to think together about shared water problems.

The walking route becomes a monitoring tool. Participants' photographs become a collective document of urban transformation. Participatory walking against expert planning — the democratisation of knowledge production.

But water is not only Istanbul's problem. Another voice, engaged in environmental justice mapping, speaks of a global network: India, Latin America, Africa. Which communities carry the ecological cost of economic growth? To whom do the resources belong? Who profits, who suffers? The maps themselves generate dialogue — activists enter data, reframe their own struggles as part of a global pattern. Researchers do not study communities; they help communities that are already organising to articulate their own analyses. Knowledge production shifts from academic extractivism to a movement-centred practice.

POSITIONING ONESELF AS STARDUST

Someone who moved to Mardin begins their account with the story of the locust. In shamanic tradition, the locust's leap signals a life change — good or bad, uncertain. They stay four years. The leap still moves them.

In the associate professorship examination, the question was asked: 'How do you position yourself?' The most honest answer came out: 'I position myself as stardust.' My practice refuses fixed positioning, remaining scattered and at a fundamental level.

This dispersal is not an escape but an ethical stance. Their research explores the difference between not mourning and living through grief — different languages, different contexts, different peoples. Where words fall short, they begin to collect the breath sounds of people who have lived through trauma. But using other people's breath recordings is not, at first, ethical. The solution: first, to record one's own breath while talking through one's own losses with a psychologist. Only then does the right to work with others' sounds arise. Danger, discomfort, the crossing of limits — necessary for growth. Childhood dives, breath work through trauma, learning to live in unfamiliar places, refusing the separation between art/life/knowledge — these are all parts of the same movement.

This person, who left a private school after Gezi to found a Faculty of Fine Arts at Mardin Artuklu University, describes the fear of being cut off from Istanbul through the metaphor of a fish out of water. But in Uganda, in Rwanda, in the back of a bus without suspension, feeling the ground directly, witnessing post-traumatic recovery, they feel most "at home." This "discomfort" is more authentic than a security-based sense of belonging.

They make coded maps — while conventional maps show coordinates, theirs show how a place reveals itself through the gaze, through bodily attention. In Mardin, on the border between the old town and the new, they spend eight hours drawing a large rock face while down below Erdoğan is speaking. The drawing becomes a map: in which direction each point faces, what is visible in each direction — power lines, an old Armenian cemetery, a fortress people cannot enter. Pressing too hard with the pen opens a hole in the paper — a physical metaphor for how attention can do harm.

DOCUMENTATION OR REPAIR?

This is the most striking question of the session: are we only documenting, or is repair possible? Perhaps only self-repair is possible — but a collective self-repair requires an evolutionary leap. Documentation is not passive — it renders erased actors visible, participates in the act of world-making, carries the risk of transforming what it records. But to move beyond documentation, to advance towards remaking the world — what that looks like is not yet clear. The question remains open, and perhaps it must.

Animals know no borders — water flows under walls. Because we draw borders, the whole ecology changes.

In open discussion, a voice proposes stopping the celebration of border-crossing and instead questioning the border itself. Narratives of border-crossing relegitimise the border. The real issue is to remember what was common before the border — water, land, practices. This historical memory work disrupts the naturalness of borders.

Another voice speaks of how gender works as a border. A model who stops shaving their legs receives rape threats. When you cross certain borders, you encounter the power that protects that border. Power wants you to remain "legible," to be comprehensible within existing categories. Bodies become border markers; refusing to conform is an act of refusing to be categorised.

The voices that came together in this session, though arriving from different disciplines, converge on a common question: how can we understand borders without naturalising them? Without romanticising border-crossing, without idealising borderlessness, while acknowledging the reality that borders both protect and restrict. Some borders protect us, some allow us to think, some restrict us unjustly. The distinction between imposed borders and chosen ones matters. The researcher draws analytic borders in order to understand — but does not confuse these analytic borders with lived borders. Distinguishing which is which is an ongoing practice.

I felt alone. This session breaks that solitude and shows that parallel work is being done across different disciplines. We do not have to do this alone.

A voice speaks of the desire for collaboration: the excitement of combining what they have collected in scattered form with what others have collected in different forms, and of transforming these collections together. Another wants to open a dialogue about how state power operates through water and dams. Another asks how internalised borders shape what we consider possible. Each voice presents its own practice as a proposal — not as an answer, but as an invitation to think together.

The energy of the boundaries session is the energy of productive ambiguity — aimed not at resolving questions but at deepening them, not at writing prescriptions but at staying with curiosity. Participants express the relief of finding others who ask similar questions in apparently distant fields. No discipline is enough on its own. Understanding boundaries requires bodily, artistic, activist, academic, and affective modes at once.

The ethical commitment underlying the work is clear: to render visible, to witness, and to sustain a practice of solidarity across borders — while attending to how our own documentary practices may be rewriting the very borders we seek to understand.