birbuçuk

THE REASON WE ARE HERE

The session opens with the usual confession: we do not know. We do not know what to do, but the seventh continent is within us, in our blood, in our brains. The concrete gathering is the fourth stop of the Sindirim programme and this time the object is as heavy as the city itself. Urban transformation, urban movements, practices of commoning, asbestos and its traces in the body, urban ecology — everything that revolves around concrete draws us into Istanbul.

But first a video is screened: "1457 Ankara'dan Kesik." In the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter there is an asteroid numbered 1457, and its name is Ankara — this celestial body, discovered by a German astronomer, was given the name of Turkey's capital. The documentary tells of the destruction of Ankara through the monograph of a donkey. A fifteen-minute excerpt from the sixty-minute film — the death of yellow monsters, organising against demolition.

Then an academic takes the stage, and the account begins in France. Henri Pézerat, a toxicologist, is working at Jussieu University in Paris in 1974. The experiments in the laboratory keep producing false results — no test holds. The reason is asbestos fibres falling from the ceiling; a poison flows beneath the beautiful walls of the new building. Pézerat does not let the discovery rest there, but turns it into a campaign among the university trade unions. In the same period, women workers at the Amisol factory, which makes asbestos strips for the French army, occupy the factory — we will not give up our factory, we will not give up our jobs. The Jussieu team goes to the women workers and says "yes, the factory and the jobs matter, but this factory is killing you." Two movements meet: from action that knows and knowledge that acts, a popular movement is born. The academic comes from the Workers' Health and Work Safety Assembly.

The issue is the traces that every environmental disaster leaves in the worker's body. Pézerat's son has made a documentary: "Les Sentinelles" — sentry, watchman, but more in the sense of "to continue hearing something." The effort to persist in hearing a reality that is constantly being covered up and kept from our sight. Workers' health is the first observer of environmental health — the first traces are read in that body. The story returns to Turkey and fastens onto the venue itself. This biennial event was actually going to be held at Tersane Istanbul — on the shore of the Golden Horn, in an industrial heritage building.

But during construction the asbestos-containing materials in the old buildings could not be cleared. Independent reports were obtained and the procedure was followed — a process of public information that worked exceptionally well for an event attended by hundreds of thousands — and the event moved to Mimar Sinan.

"The reason we are here is asbestos."

Asbestos is not only industrial; in Turkey it also occurs naturally. Erionite, which comes from Cappadocia's geological history, is a natural fibre that resembles asbestos. İzzettin Barış and a few researchers have worked on this subject for years. But industrial asbestos is a different story. The İzocam factory in Dilovası began production in 1967 and in 2006 came to be co-owned by Saint-Gobain, France's largest former asbestos company. It dumps all its waste on a plot of two thousand square metres; when the glass wool mixes with the asbestos-laden rubble around it, it creates an incredibly toxic environment — the factory is here, the waste is here, the people are here too. At Eczacıbaşı's ceramic facilities in Bozüyük, thousands of workers are employed, and silicosis rates are alarming. Workers are forced to choose between their livelihood and their lives. A yellow union is set over them, and zero cases of occupational disease are reported — no one dies, according to official records. Asbestos lives as a mineral beneath the ground, as an industry in the worker's lungs, as concealment in the state's reports. The companies financing arts events and the companies making workers sick are the same; because public funding cannot be found, one is compelled to accept these sponsorships.

AN ISTANBUL WITHOUT DOGS

The second section comes from the peripheries of Istanbul, from the wounds opened by mega-projects. An association has been walking through neighbourhoods for years — in districts undergoing urban transformation, whose residents have been forcibly displaced, and which are struggling with public health problems. Kirazlıtepe is one of these: asbestos-containing rubble from demolition, precisely the public health problem the academic warned about. Each walk is an effort at mapping, at archiving — in different languages, with different tools, sometimes video, sometimes maps, sometimes semi-academic publications. For Istanbul is changing so fast that even keeping a record of it is a struggle.

The Northern Marmara Highway, the third airport, the third bridge — a series of projects beginning with concrete and ending with concrete, claimed to begin with demolition and end with construction. But in the hidden pages of the construction process there is the isolation of animals. Stray dogs are rounded up in trucks and dumped at the highway construction site — systematically, hundreds, thousands of them. The municipality does not ear-tag them, no count is kept, the perpetrator cannot be identified.

A documentary filmmaker who went to the site narrates: imagine hundreds of dogs running towards you when you arrive. Most are hungry, most are thirsty. When you bring food, they are too dehydrated to eat. Even the dam behind them has been wrecked; no source of water has been left. A vast area, no shade — dogs try to shelter in the shadow of the cranes. Because the cranes are a lattice of crossed iron, they cast no full shade, only a trace of one. The dogs try to get under that half-darkness.

It is a post-apocalyptic setting. Something like a doomsday scenario — and this is inside Istanbul.

Molossus — the great dog of ancient Greece. The city's tame street dogs find themselves exterminated and dumped in the backs of the yellow trucks. A researcher spent years building an archive by counting the dogs one by one. But recently the municipality has even stopped ear-tagging — so no count is kept at all, no perpetrator can be identified. Sometimes a handful of dogs, sometimes dozens, hundreds. The yellow trucks carry asbestos-laden spoil; they carry dogs too — rubble and living beings in the same truck, in the same direction, everything the city does not want to see heading north. The question of concrete thus offers a way of looking at the system's perpetrators, its powerful, its rulers, through rubbish, through rubble, through loss.

THE PLANTS OF RUIN

The stage is darkened and a manifesto begins — in the voice of the plants:

"Destruction has always existed. Even before the apes. For them destruction, for us life."

Ruderal plants. The first inhabitants of demolition sites — species living not in any botanical garden, greenhouse, park or pot but in the cracks of grey stone, in rubbish, in ruins, under bridges, in burnt land, at motorway edges, in construction pits, in all the voids of the city. Weeds have learned the language of humans. In the first towns ever founded, where war first broke out, they were the first to spring up. They have infiltrated seeds, invaded fields, crossed from continent to continent in birds' stomachs, in dogs' saliva, in car tyres.

These plants do not need imposing trunks, large and tasty fruits or showy flowers to survive. They prefer not the individual but the multitude, not a long life but the transience of a vagrant existence. Soils without nutrients, very wet or very dry, very alkaline or very acidic — these are not their problem. Humankind's classifications are inconsistent: what it admired two hundred years ago it now declares harmful, and what it once declared harmful it now protects.

The manifesto mocks romantic ecology: "They have no need of ecological heroics, of the fallacies of recycling and rehabilitation, of being saved. They are not objects to be repaired." For they will go on multiplying as the world is destroyed. Every order creates new destruction, every construction new waste, every building new rubbish heap, every rubbish heap new resource, new life. They survived ice ages, agricultural revolutions, world wars — because they are disaster, chaos, opportunity and invasion.

And the most provocative line:

The human being is a parasite. It cannot produce nutrients like a plant. It cannot survive without cutting, fragmenting, killing and eating the plant.

But the human being is also the best partner of ruderal plants. Clearing forests, creating rubbish heaps, opening roads, digging canals — wherever there is destruction, weeds grow. The plant is not an object to be romanticised, but an agent living alongside destruction, feeding from destruction, turning destruction into life.

THE PAST WAS BURIED IN CONCRETE

On stage, an artist is making a cake with cement, Kalekim (a tile adhesive) and water. Kalekim makes it tastier, apparently. When the artist was a child, there was no patisserie in the village — cake was a luxury, a mark of class. Now, with the material of that luxury, the material of concrete, the artist tries to get the consistency of cake — adding a little water, stirring: "I'm not very skilled, this is my first time making a cake with concrete." The performance is a concrete metaphor of class transformation; the inexperience is part of the work.

In the eighties the village had small houses set in green gardens. Everyone was content. Then a transformation began: houses were demolished and replaced by buildings with shops below and flats above. These apartment blocks covered everything. The stream running alongside the house was buried in concrete. The grass in the school yard was concreted over; because the population increased, another school was built in the yard. İsmet Teyze and Abdullah Amca's enormous garden and its fig trees were torn out, and an apartment block went up in their place.

Little by little, the whole past was buried in concrete.

Concrete has a class dimension. For people who migrated from village to city, concrete was the symbol of modernisation; moving from the garden to the apartment was a step up. But this step up buried streams, gardens, fig trees, childhood memories. Once, in a supermarket with a friend, the artist saw a flower and wanted to talk about it. "It's ugly, it's bent on one side," the friend said. In the friend's mind a plant has to be magnificent — if one side dies, if a branch falls, it is bad. But someone with a relationship to the soil knows: one side of a plant can die, a branch can fall, seasons pass. "Have you ever sown a crop?" the artist asks the hall — it is something like losing the crop; it is nothing like buying something at a supermarket.

THE POSSIBILITY OF ANOTHER WORLD

The one bearer of hope at the concrete gathering comes from a vegetable garden. Roma Bostanı — a garden living in the heart of Istanbul as a practice of commoning. Born after Gezi — or, more exactly, it ran after the possibility that Gezi opened.

Gezi was an intervention in a public space. There we rebuilt life in a city. The possibility of another world found its way into all our hearts.

Roma Bostanı is the concrete form of this possibility: permaculture, solidarity within the neighbourhood, transformation through one's own labour, applied politics. A practice that stands its ground where creating new green space seems impossible, that touches the soil and sows crops. All the practices formed after Gezi — vegetable gardens, cooperatives, solidarity networks — run after this possibility.

The Q&A session gains unexpected depth. At last week's potato gathering there was a farmer from Kars — cheese, agriculture, a bond with the soil — and a sense of hope had arisen in the hall, a confidence that things could change through touch. As we come closer to the city, though, cut off from the soil and drifting away from the anti-romantic language of plants, we turn inward. Someone questions the false division between city and countryside: we idealise the countryside, we imagine a distant village — but the capital groups transforming both are the same. Cengiz is building the third airport here and a hydroelectric plant there. The actors are the same, the tools are the same, the power is the same. Moreover, since the metropolitan municipality law passed in 2004, Istanbul officially has no rural area left. Thirty metropolitan municipalities have no rural area — all villages became neighbourhoods. Which countryside are we talking about?

Another voice speaks of there being no way out: on a planet that has gone through five great crises, ours is one of them. I cannot find in books why I should defend biodiversity. What I do find is barbaric, anthropocentric — in the end it proposes systems that will destroy other living things. I do not know what absolute justice is.

In this darkness someone tells a story that mixes death with life: they used to explain death to their daughter as "we'll be worms, we'll be flowers, we'll be insects." Children become aware of death at five or six and ask about it, and death is explained through life. What they tell their daughter in everyday life needs to be reflected in the struggle too — advancing without victory, without being right, by weaving the process. If we think everything through to the end, it all collapses anyway — but the process itself carries a wisdom. From here we can go down together through Galataport, someone says — the venue itself is an irony, we are right in the middle of the transformation of industrial heritage into luxury consumption. If a recycling worker spoke, they would say "recycling has ruined us," someone says — because even in the worker's mind recycling is that clean concept from the municipality's advertisements.

But what is defined as waste is worth money; concepts defined as ecology are absorbed by the market. Urban transformation in Berlin: Aldi shops close, eco-markets open in their place — the same product sells for two or three times the price. For a while people spoke of "urban recycling"; it was a very pleasing concept, because it is a word that makes everything bloom. The ecological narrative is a new instrument of capital. Roma Bostanı can do something, but an industry will also buy up the same concepts and sell something else. One voice proposes making the struggles common: connecting the telling of the Dikmen Valley resistance with the telling of Roma Bostanı.

The Hevsel Gardens. To show that this is not an alienation, that at the centre or on the periphery this resistance is shared — to multiply spaces, to connect one to another. As the concrete gathering leaves the hall, a few things remain in hand: the invisible violence of asbestos, the helplessness of the dogs in the crane's shadow, the manifesto of ruderal plants born of destruction, the bitter consistency of the cake made with concrete, and the stubborn greenness of a vegetable garden.

When we look at the city we move away from the hopeful tone of the potato and water gatherings — but within this very drift the ruderal plants propose a model of life: to grow where there is destruction.