birbuçuk

THE STORY THAT BEGINS IN ADAPAZARI

At the centre today are food, agriculture, seed and livestock policies, and food sovereignty. The burden that industrial agriculture places on life and the planet, the commodification of food, our disconnection from food production processes, economic hardship and migration — and the alternative models that have arisen in opposition to them, the resistance of traditional agriculture, the transmission of knowledge between generations. The potato holds all of these conversations together.

A farmer takes the stage, having rushed to get here: from the village by taxi, from the taxi on foot, running for two stops to make it in time. "When you say potato, so many things come to mind," they begin. The potato was first planted in Turkey in Adapazarı, and that is where this farmer grew up. They remember the potatoes: not very handsome, a little crooked, shapeless, but you'd light a fire, bury them in the ash, sprinkle salt on top, and eat them. The flavour came not from the shape but from the soil.

But most of those potatoes are gone now. Industrial agriculture swept away local varieties. Corporate seeds produce a single standard product — it is no coincidence that all the potatoes in the supermarket are the same size; it is the result of a standardisation policy. Irregular potatoes, amorphous potatoes are left out of the market. As the genetic pool narrows, resistance to diseases weakens too — dependency on a single variety is a recipe for famine.

Another farmer speaks of a seed-sorting machine — a simple implement, which even village councils have now begun to buy. Out of a single seed come three or four, sometimes six or seven, different grades of seed. Yields increased by 30–35 percent with local seeds. And that rise began to break down the farmers' misconception that "local seed is unproductive." Then came ongoing training and volunteer specialists — four or five sessions a year, without ever letting up.

We had been given the wrong idea. They said local seed gave a low yield. We started using the machine, and with local seeds the yield went up.

THE METAPHORS OF THE IRREGULAR: THE MATERIALITY OF THE POTATO

The second voice belongs to an artist and opens up an entirely different side of the potato: its materiality. They explain that plastic can be made from potato starch. A British artist's madcap project: an attempt to build a toaster from scratch — a toaster has four hundred parts: steel, copper, mica, plastic. The artist cast the toaster's plastic from potato starch, but left it out overnight to dry and snails ate it. Even failure carries meaning: nature maintains its own cycle no matter what humans do.

This chemical transformation resembles agriculture, says the artist: like ordering the soil in rows, ordering the polymers is also an urge to control. Like a farmer pulling unwanted weeds from a field, vinegar works its way in between and clears out the disordered polymers; glycerin, like water seeping into soil, seeps in among the polymers, binding them and making them elastic. The artist tried this at home, making plastic in the kitchen from water, white vinegar, glycerin and potato starch. But the potato's real story lies in its materiality: a plant that stands out for its permanence — it keeps for four or five months in a dark, dry place, a long life compared with other vegetables. Today, turned into bioplastic, it stands out for its impermanence: it decomposes in nature within two months. From permanence to impermanence — the potato plays with time itself.

Agnès Varda's 2000 film "The Gleaners and I" enters this discussion. Varda followed socially marginalised people who gathered the irregular produce left in the fields after the harvest — inspired by Jean-François Millet's 1857 painting of gleaners. Heart-shaped potatoes became Varda's signature: tubers that fall outside the order, that grow from two ends, a metaphor for different forms of life. There is something irregular about Varda too, who turned to contemporary art at a very advanced age, went to the Venice Biennale in a potato costume, saying, "Who comes to an exhibition at this age?" and showed the installation "Patatutopia." After Varda's death in 2019, people leave heart-shaped potatoes on the grave instead of flowers — an artist's legacy lives on through a tuber.

They look at the potato and say it gives you leprosy. It is not even in the Bible. What's more, it grows underground — suspicious. But when famine comes, there is nothing else left.

A WORLD HISTORY ON THE TRAIL OF THE POTATO

Another presentation suddenly widens the table — it traverses world history on the trail of the potato. A researcher begins with the silver mines of South America: the Spanish built an empire with the silver they extracted from Potosí, but on the same ships they also transported the potato to Europe. In Europe the potato was initially rejected — for three reasons: it is not in the Bible (so eating it counts as a sin), the fact that it grows underground arouses suspicion, and its tuberous form stirs a fear of leprosy. The way knowledge was acquired at the time worked by analogy — if a walnut looks like a brain, it is good for the brain. What does the potato resemble? Leprosy. As Foucault described, it was only in the seventeenth century that people began saying "perhaps that is not how this works." But wars and famines make accepting the potato unavoidable.

The Protestant-Catholic wars devastated Europe, hunger set in, and people had no choice but the potato. And one characteristic of the potato changes everything: dense calories from a small plot of land. It does not compete with wheat — while wheat grows on fertile land, the potato grows on mountain tops never used before, on stony ground, in those parts of Ireland where, it was said, "only a cow can live." Wherever it arrives, a population explosion follows: Ireland, Germany; in China, the sweet potato — every society using the potato grows rapidly. This population growth makes colonialism possible: England is not only seizing land, it is also exporting its people — to Australia, New Zealand, America. Underpinning its killing of the indigenous peoples there and settling its own population in their place are the potato's calories. The researcher adds, "I am simplifying a little, telling it as if there were a single cause," but builds a strong argument: the points where world population exploded coincide with the map of the potato's spread.

If we are going to talk about climate change, then in one sense we need to talk about this too. It is a fine thing that the potato is so resilient, but at the same time it has brought humanity a great deal of trouble. The real question is what kind of life we organise around it.

Here the concept of the "Capitalocene" comes to mind: not the Anthropocene but an age brought about by capitalism. The chain connecting the potato to colonialism, colonialism to industrial agriculture, industrial agriculture to the climate crisis lies precisely within this concept.

BOĞATEPE: ANOTHER LIFE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

Another voice comes from the village of Boğatepe in Kars and has brought a real gift to the hall: boiled Kars potatoes and local cheeses. Food sovereignty ceases to be an abstract concept and becomes an experience touching the palate — the hall eats, tastes, smells. "What happens when we eat this potato? It is not that potato from childhood, but it carries its scent," someone says. The farmer questions the real reason for rural flight: it seems economic, but beneath it lie the weakness of social life and the loss of a sense of belonging. People cannot see the worth of the place where they were born.

Although what triggers migration may seem economic, the fundamental reason underneath is the weakness of social life. The weakness of the sense of belonging.

A different model has been established in Boğatepe. Botanical and ethnobotanical studies have been conducted — more than six hundred plant varieties have been discovered in the region; all were thought to be mere "weeds," but each has its own identity, its uses, its benefits. Traditional knowledge called "old wives' methods" has been combined with university knowledge. Local cheese production has been revitalised. Anatolian animal breeds are being protected: the Caucasian bee, the Eastern Anatolian Red and Anatolian Grey cattle — one of the world's fundamental gene sources for cattle breeds — the Caucasian Smoke, the Çıldır Black. Turkey's only ecomuseum has been established in Boğatepe: it is the Turkish branch of a movement that, against the pressure industrialisation put on local production cultures after the 1950s, says "I will live my culture." There are 573 ecomuseums in the world, one in Turkey.

In the programme that brings town and country together, children from the city bake bread in the village, milk cows, make cheese. An older woman of the village once said: "Up on this mountain we see no faces but each other's. When you come, it means a great deal to us. Please, do come once a week. But no more than that — don't let it eat into your time." Solidarity tourism: a tourist who produces rather than consumes, joining in the farm work for a week, sowing, sharing in common labour. Agricultural school students come from Belgium, couples come from various countries.

The food law that came out in 2005 removed local cheeses from shelves. Large supermarkets had the law enacted: local products get a five percent share of shelf space. But citizens resisted — they brought the produce in by bus; the buses were stopped on the roads and the goods in their luggage holds destroyed. Some came in the most luxurious cars to buy these products. A message to the market: "However much you ban them, we want the flavours and the nourishing food that come from Anatolia's clean soil." Today there are 973 outlets in Istanbul selling local, organic and traditional products. They have taken the place of the neighbourhood grocers that were shut down.

UNDERGROUND STARS: A POETIC CLOSING

Two performances open up the poetic dimension of the potato. Three members of a collective, in three different cities, wrote texts independently of one another and made videos — then, without interfering with each other and trusting each other's sensibility, brought them together. It continues their earlier collective work on the melon: treating a fruit or vegetable as both metaphor and reality. Underground and above-ground, root and star, seed and transformation interweave: "Potatoes are both stars and plants. Plants are both root and organism." A warning comes from Demeter: "The family tree has branched too much. Is the life you live above ground in direct proportion to finding the stars underground?"

Let us not be extinguished by multiplying. Let us not surrender by warming. If we are to die, let us die like stars. With the air of a supernova.

Another performance — a group of four — has built stories around the potato: a housewife serves the family, a soldier serves the state and is punished with potato-peeling duty, a pope serves religion and bans the potato. Each character is part of a relationship of service, with the potato at the centre of each: innocent and diabolical, permanent and transient, underground and above-ground. The performer also narrates their own journey: after talking about the potato at the first birbuçuk meeting, they decided to combine poetry and video, to draw stories out of research.

In the closing Q&A a farmer takes the floor, and for a moment the hall falls still: "This process reminded me once again that what we do, small-scale farming, is a craft — and that a craft is, at its core, an art." Another voice puts it this way: of the two living things most successful at carrying on their line, one is wheat and the other the potato; we have gathered around the two of them, and we too live in their orbit — do you realise? The point where art meets real life lets us dream; we know we cannot get anywhere without dreaming. The potato session connects the artist to the farmer, the farmer to the researcher, the researcher to the performer. The boiled Kars potato on the table has gone cold, but its taste lingers in the hall.