birbuçuk

THE FETISHISM OF GROWTH

Mining, coal, energy, construction, gold. Behind all of them is the same drive: to cash in quickly. To generate energy quickly. To build buildings, roads, airports quickly. Behind this drive lies a serious fetishism of growth — an ideology that regards economic growth as necessary, natural and good. Questioning growth is branded as naivety or betrayal. Yet growth serves particular interests — those of corporations, contractors, the state — while distributing its costs to others: workers, communities, ecosystems.

Behind all of this there is a serious fetishism of growth.

Environmental problems do not arise from the absence of market prices — that is a reductive and naive view. The problem lies in conflicts between winners and losers, in collective action failures, in power asymmetries. Ecological economics puts at its centre not pricing but power relations and politics. Extractivism extends beyond mining: the enormous extraction of sand for construction, geothermal energy consumption, agricultural collapse, fishing, forestry. In Turkey, geothermal energy is the fastest-growing energy sector — labelled "clean energy," but companies discharge heated steam into rivers and the air rather than re-injecting it underground.

The discourse of an energy deficit is also a mystification. Official figures show an energy surplus; the deficit is an artificial construct, legitimised by the ideology of growth. The rhetoric of "we need energy" masks the real question: energy for whom? Energy for what? It is not individual users who consume most of the electricity, but concrete plants, shopping centres, the construction industry. But neoliberal framing shifts responsibility onto the individual: "If you're against mining, don't use electricity."

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF RESISTANCE

To understand Artvin's place in Turkey's mining resistance, one must look at the struggle that has continued since 1993. Approximately 300 mining licences are active in the province. Cerattepe — the mountain adjacent to the city centre — is the most contested site. If Artvin were Istanbul, Cerattepe would be Taksim.

Think of where we are as Artvin. And think of the mine site as Taksim. That, really, is what it all comes down to.

There are three reasons for Artvin's disproportionate visibility. First, a powerful diaspora network: wherever people from Artvin have migrated — Istanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Antalya, Muğla — they mobilise there for the causes of their home region. This geographically dispersed network creates a resonance that purely local movements cannot achieve. Second, more than twenty-five years of organised local resistance: door-to-door organising, two mining companies sent away, two lawsuits won. Third, a multi-pronged strategy — academic analysis, legal struggle, media presence, artistic and cultural intervention, direct action, international solidarity. When any one of these is absent, the whole structure weakens.

The process that led the Anadolu Group to pull out of its investment in Gerze, into which it had already sunk more than three million dollars, was made possible by a synergy of the intellectual left, a people's choir, legal work and the media — it is described as Turkey's greatest success in this field.

But activism is also a story of personal transformation. Someone who has lost their Laz language, who goes back home every summer, who belongs to the fourth generation of a mining family but does not work in the mine, learns under the pressure of circumstances: Photoshop (for protest posters), video editing, the kemençe (for the music). "Conditions forced me. I didn't want to. They turned me into this." Editor of a local news site, designer, musician — all the same person, because resistance demands versatility.

The Eastern Black Sea "Master Plan" — presented as a tourism route but actually a map of energy, mining and hydroelectric extraction — explains the green roads: nine metres wide, claimed to be built for tourists but in reality traversed by haul trucks. Fatsa is one of Turkey's largest hazelnut markets; the fields around it have been stripped by mining and quality has fallen; the hazelnuts Italy sent back are thought to have come from there.

THE KILLER'S NAME

Media routinely conceals company names in mining accidents. We often do not know the names of those who died — but we also do not know the names of the killers. Unmasking — naming companies, mapping ownership structures, identifying decision-makers — is a political practice.

The killer has only one name; I think that one may be easy for you to keep in mind.

The chasm between official statistics and reality is vast. An estimated seventy per cent of mining deaths are unregistered — settled by handshake, by blood money. Chinese workers die, are buried locally, are not recorded, disappear. An estimated seven or eight workers die every day, but these deaths are invisible because they are scattered. When 301 people die at once it becomes news; deaths that come one at a time pass in silence.

Two villages have been submerged for a dam — Sirya (Zeytinlik), where olives were traditionally grown, and Oruçlu. Both were relocated to new villages; then the mine roads were to be routed through the relocated Oruçlu. The villagers: "You already took our ancestral land, submerged our fields, moved us — and now a road too?" Mountains and valleys carry embodied histories. Mining erases the layered temporal relationships people hold to place. The old stay but the young migrate — villages lose half their people — and the social fabric tears.

In Bartın — in Tarlaağzı — a second Soma is approaching. The region, home to farmers and fishers, has a coal mine; now there are plans to build a thermal power plant there as well. Children and spouses work in the mines; parents are opposed to the thermal plant. The mining company says: "We're going to extract it anyway."

THE WOUNDS OF THE EARTH

A visual artist uses satellite photographs to make visible the "wounds" that open-cast mines leave on the earth's surface. Seen from a satellite, each mine is a single dot — but at ground level its scale is catastrophic.

The colours are radically manipulated to make the image painterly. Each mine is named, with data drawn from the Environmental Justice Atlas. The production process itself is 'crazy work.

Dead landscapes: the removal of topsoil leaves barren terrain. Toxic waste ponds: reservoirs of chemical waste. The 2015 Bento Rodrigues dam collapse in Brazil poisoned the Rio Doce for hundreds of kilometres. As mines on land are exhausted, extraction shifts to the ocean floor — island nations such as Papua New Guinea sell the rights to mine their seabed. Oceans are designated not only as extraction sites but also as places to bury carbon dioxide — the oceans of the future as a dump for carbon.

Contemporary art focuses intensely on political content but engages very little with environmental problems. This gap is the motivation for the work. Aestheticising the catastrophe is deliberate — it catches the viewer's attention, then exposes the horror beneath. The discomfort between "beautiful" and "toxic" is created on purpose.

A second series consists of panoramas assembled from images of catastrophe in the media — wars, burning buildings, melting glaciers. Stitched together, these images create submerged worlds, bombed landscapes, apocalyptic compositions. They reference climate futures — London in ice-age conditions, for example. The artist's move from training in economics to art is not a rupture but another form of the same effort to make visible the systems that have been made invisible. Infographics, diagrams, charts, photographs, video — the tools change but all of them go through a process of extensive research and archiving.

SOMA MEANS BODY

A dance artist argues that the body is the primary political-ecological domain. Their journey, which began with ballet and evolved towards somatic practice, is the story of a passage from goal-driven technical perfection to bodily awareness. The body is addressed in three separate registers: as mind, as psychology, as kinaesthetic wisdom.

The dancer too, in fact, works in a dark environment to extract the ore within. The miner too works underground. To reach an ore they do not know.

Mining and dance are structurally identical: both extract value from bodies, both rapidly consume bodies, both rank high in "worst jobs" lists. The miner descends underground seeking ore; the dancer works in the dark seeking truth. Both the miner's workplace and the dancer's are called a "salon."

The link with mining comes about through a chance discovery. Travelling to Çanakkale for a theatre workshop, the artist meets a mining engineer: "Can we do improvisation in the mine?" The group descends into the mine, finds a large void, performs an intense two-hour improvisation. Then the engineer reports that a high-quality vein of silver was discovered at exactly that spot.

The Soma disaster (2014) deepens this connection. One of the artist's performances — with miners' helmets sent from Soma, framed around labour and commemoration — has been staged again and again since 2016. Audiences watch from three sides and above — the performance lets them feel at once the distance of looking down from above and of being underground. But funders do not want the name Soma to appear: "Remove Soma. Don't even let the name appear." Artists are pressured into self-censorship — commemoration is politically dangerous because to remember is to question the system.

An understanding of the ecological body that opens out from micro to macro, not from macro to micro: the dynamics of the individual body mirror larger socio-ecological systems. Effort, power, violence in individual movement — these mirror the violence of the wider world. Bodily phenomenology grounds ecological understanding: bodies consume energy, express power, register pain. Without a shift from individual bodily awareness to a collective understanding of the body, macro-scale environmental work fails.

Dance projects with diverse bodies — 150 participants, working with people labelled as disabled, dance and body-awareness workshops in prison — show that the body is not merely an individual organism but the focus of systemic oppression, resistance and ecological relation. Windows forced open in the dance building of a university, a struggle against toxic indoor air from construction nearby; a project for barefoot contact with the soil — students need open air and contact with the soil to work in good health.

KILOMETRES OF GREY

Over six months, a photographer documents the quarries on the edge of Istanbul. The sixteen quarries around the village of Cebeci lie very close to Alibeyköy Dam, Istanbul's water source. Dynamite is set off every day — dust clouds that hang for 20–25 minutes, breaking windows, cracking walls.

Grey is as dominant as it could possibly be; you don't even need to shoot in black and white. Green appears only in places spared by the spread of the quarries.

But Soma is a different scale: "You travel kilometres and kilometres and kilometres. No green." Constantly burning coal — not just coal dust but active combustion. A constant haze of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Every day 40,000 workers go to work; someone who works there for ten days spends four or five of them in the infirmary. Truck tyres two to two-and-a-half metres in diameter — the scale is truly terrifying.

A journey that begins with documenting the Third Bridge extends to documenting the Third Airport, and from there to all of Istanbul's urban transformation. Istanbul's "beautiful" new areas — the Bomonti transformation, the Hilton district — rise simultaneously with the ecological collapse of the quarry zones. The city beautifies selectively while demolishing its ecological capacity. "We noticed the thing. What can we do, what can we do" — helplessness in the face of scale leads to small-scale interventions: projects for barefoot contact with the soil, stencil greening.

EVERYONE KNEW

In Soma the system "worked correctly." Alarm systems functioned. Everyone — workers, engineers — knew and had accepted the risk. Not individual negligence but structural tragedy. Workers "knowingly" took the risk — because there was no other option. Agriculture had been deliberately destroyed, rural populations driven to mining and construction as the only option.

It is something I see and feel — that neoliberal hegemony has in a sense infected all of us in some way, gnawed a little at all of our brains.

301 deaths changed national consciousness — Soma became Turkey's keyword for sacrifice and tragedy. But collective memory is fading rapidly. By the second anniversary, solidarity events had dwindled. Six more mining disasters followed; each drew very little attention. When the death toll runs to two or three digits, it makes news; when it is in single digits, it passes in silence. This forgetting is structural — it serves mining interests. If commemoration is not sustained as a political practice, the system normalises forgetting.

What happened in Soma is still going on. Families live with trauma, economic devastation, grief. The complexity of mourning — 301 families, each receiving different compensation — has created fractures within the community. The mystification of the labour-nature relationship is most nakedly visible here: thermal plants burn coal, heat cities, ostensibly for citizens' welfare — but in reality for corporate profit. Workers sacrifice their health and their lives. The rhetoric of "so that we don't go cold" masks the real distribution of power.

When you say "I don't want this" without alternatives, the struggle has little chance of lasting. Real resistance is not only about opposing particular mines but about building alternatives. Turkish agriculture has been deliberately destroyed — people who until twenty years ago lived off farming far more happily and contentedly have seen their lives change. This process, which drives rural populations into mining and construction as their only option, also breaks their capacity to resist: people know the mines are destructive but say, "My family has to get by"; economic desperation is systematically exploited.

Making farming a livelihood again, creating economic options — resistance must include these too. Individual consumer choices are insufficient; structural transformation is necessary. The olive law is the only barrier that stands today in the way of mining expansion in Turkey. The mining conflicts in the Kaz Mountains repeatedly remind us of the importance of this law.

This session moves towards a concrete outcome: going to Soma in the summer with a mixed team — academic, artistic, activist. No predetermined conclusion. Experimental engagement. Deliberate slowness. A sustained presence — not a one-off intervention. Because mourning is complex: 301 families, each receiving different compensation, fractures opened up. The matter is not closed.

No single discipline captures the complexity of mining on its own. Economics shows the profit motive; ecology, the environmental cost; labour studies, the conditions of workers; history, regional trajectories; art renders visible what analysis abstracts. Effective resistance requires simultaneous multi-perspectival engagement. Walking almost every quarry and mining site in the Kaz Mountains, producing reports in Soma, conducting fieldwork from Central Asia to Ecuador — the academic, activist and artistic fields are all at work at once.

The mining session offers a model of how intellectual-artistic-activist collaboration works in practice: not hierarchical, not siloed, not disembodied, not resigned. Although it documents a vast injustice, the meeting ends in concrete project planning; the participants are committed to sustained engagement. This is working in dark times by facing the dark.