birbuçuk

THE RIGHT OF WATER TO FLOW: AN OPENING

The world is warmer than ever before and warming faster than ever before. The world is more polluted than ever before and being polluted faster than ever before. We are trying to grow without limit on limited resources. We are trying to pollute without limit with limited sinks. We have exceeded the limits; we are heading towards extinction.

The seventh continent is within us, in our blood, in our brains. From within a broken and unjust system we are trying to change that same system. And we have absolutely no idea what we are going to do.

The opening remarks begin like a confession: we do not know. We do not know what we will do, but we accept not knowing itself as a starting point. We do not know whether humanity will become extinct, but we are certain that human rights, animal rights and the rights of nature will be extinguished. This struggle, the opening says, is a struggle against ourselves — it is easy to look for the enemy outside, but we are that very enemy.

The first public gathering of the Sindirim programme is for water, for water's right to flow. Thoughts accumulated over three years in the closed sessions of the Solunum programme are now being taken into the public sphere — within the Biennial framework but overflowing it. The format is a marathon: researchers, activists, artists and musicians will take the stage one after another, each presentation lasting about twenty minutes, with a changeover between them.

THE VICIOUS CYCLE: ISTANBUL'S RECKONING WITH WATER

The first presentation tells the story of Istanbul's water — and this story is a vicious cycle. The natural water cycle is simple: evaporation from surfaces, cloud, precipitation, meeting the soil. But where is the soil in Istanbul? It is concrete and asphalt everywhere. Rain cannot touch the soil, cannot seep into it; the cycle is disrupted. Why is it concrete everywhere? Because there is migration. Why is there migration? Because the investment is here. Why is the investment here? Because it is profitable. As long as water flows from the tap, people will keep flowing in.

The researcher reels off the figures, and each figure is a wound: a population of more than 15 million, daily water consumption of 2.73 million cubic metres — this city is an enormous water monster. Network loss: 23.6 per cent — one glass of water in every four leaves the dam and, before it can reach a home, seeps away into the soil through cracks and bursts. The city has close to 170 streams; most of them have been imprisoned in concrete channels. Annual rainfall is above the average for Turkey — this is not a city poor in water but a city poor in water management. Lake Terkos has supplied Istanbul since the 1880s but now faces the threat of saltwater intrusion. The solution: water is brought from Büyük Melen, 185 kilometres away — a project to quench a megacity's thirst with the water of another region.

The city reaches out to wherever there is water. Wherever it lays a hand, it dries the water up. Then it reaches further.

SKAMANGANA FELL SILENT: THE CULTURAL MEMORY OF THE BLACK SEA

The second voice comes from the Black Sea and the narrative begins with an object: the skamangana. The device of a culture four thousand years old — an implement that runs on the rivulets flowing down the valleys and keeps wild animals off the farmland with the sound of a bell. Killing the animals never crossed our ancestors' minds; out of water, chestnut wood and ingenuity combined, they devised a solution.

But the skamanganas stopped. Because the rivulets that fed them are gone. Of the small branches that ran down from the valleys to the streams, not even the channels are left, not even their traces. As blood circulates in the human body, so water circulates in the soil — cut off the water above, and you have cut the vein of all the life downstream, the whole length of the valley. In the activist's telling, the story is "they came" — a few companies, greedy and two-faced, arriving with their energy lies. They dynamited the mountains, filled the shores with rocks, handcuffed the streams. Hydroelectric plants — HES — imprisoned the streams' water in pipes with the lie "We'll release it back further down shortly." Red-spotted trout began to disappear; as the water dries up, the culture dries up with it. The narrative turns into a fairy tale: Çinka — Laz for water spirit.

One day, when the daughter of the King of the Spirits had taken off her head and was combing its hair, the wind sent the head rolling and a bramble thorn caught it; and Çinka blessed the thorn, saying, "May your line never die out." The tale breaks off halfway: "Everything is half-finished. Half a stream, half a film." Like the skamanganas, the tale can no longer flow with the water.

If only Çinka had blessed all of the Black Sea. So that your roots would never be torn out, so that no one could come.

TOXIC LOVE: FROM WITHIN THE SEVENTH CONTINENT

The third voice is scientific but its language is poetic — a marine scientist who teaches the subject at a university and always comes to class with a small sample jar. They tell the story of microplastics: more than 900 chemical substances are used in plastic production, 148 of them lethal. If our carpets don't burn, if our bags hold firm, if our PET bottles flex, it is because of those chemicals. "We are having a toxic love affair with plastic," they say. "Either you're mine or the black earth's — that is what plastic tells us." The Mediterranean is a microplastic soup.

The Eastern Mediterranean — our very own waters — is one of the reddest regions on the world map. In İskenderun Bay, in Mersin, 31 kilograms of plastic wash up on the shores every day, and a hundred times as much is buried on the seabed. In a small sample jar of 200 millilitres: five billion microplastic particles. Close to five billion — part of them counted, the rest estimated by proportion. Plankton eat, fish eat, seals eat, birds eat, we eat. Even the water from washing machines is full of plastic fibres.

We rewind the tape. We threw the plastic away. The plastic came back to us. Processed, changed, transformed. In salt, in mussels, in oysters, in fish, in everything.

BETWEEN TWO SEAS: MATERIAL, BOUNDARY, WALKING

The fourth voice belongs to an engineer-artist, who reads Istanbul through its material flows — with the analytical eye of an engineer's training and the observer's distance of the visual arts: quarries, construction spoil, concrete. The quarries behind the Gazi neighbourhood are growing ever wider. Old lignite beds have been filled with excavation spoil and the third airport built on top of them — "catastrophic" ground, where all the city's rubble has been gathered. Bosphorus City: a gated community built on top of the old Halkalı rubbish dump; an artificial canal fed with water drawn without permission from Lake Küçükçekmece. The plainest form of the grotesque.

But the engineer-artist does not only diagnose; they also propose a method: walking. The act of walking is one of the most fundamental movements in human history — from Gandhi's marches to the Paris uprising of 1968, from the Stalker collective to the Lycian Way. They propose turning the course of Canal Istanbul into a walking route: let people experience with their own bodies everything that is to come, the good and the bad. The debate over border dams belongs in this frame too: the GAP dams, the US-Mexico wall, Israel-Palestine, the Turkey-Syria border — water is being turned into a security instrument, an object of militarism.

Is a border wall being built out of water, with security dams? Whose security do these dams ensure? Is water being stripped of all its vital contexts and turned into a tool of militarism?

THE SOUND OF WATER: A CLOSING

Throughout the marathon, two performances are also staged — a group performs a water ritual, bringing their bodies and voices into contact with water; a musician turns the contact between plant roots and water into electrical signals, and from there into sound. These are not reflected in the written transcript but constitute the spirit of the programme: water is not only an object to be analysed but a presence to be experienced, heard, touched. The juxtaposition of research and performance is birbuçuk's method: knowledge comes not only from data but from the body.

At the close, a young voice rises, in English: "Maybe they will ask me about you, the people you knew back in 2018. Maybe they will ask why you didn't do anything." The silence that descends on the hall is like an answer. Next week comes the petrol gathering — the oil economy, the climate crisis, museum protests. Sindirim's public marathon has begun, and water, its first object, has laid out what is at once the most concrete and the most political: every stream whose right to flow has been usurped, every waterway imprisoned in a concrete channel, every sea filled with microplastics, every dam turned into a tool of militarism — all are different faces of the same system. The right of water to flow is in fact the right of life to flow.