birbuçuk

WHEN WE COULD BE PLAYING LIKE CHILDREN

The last gathering. The fifth object. Water, petrol, potato, concrete — and now the processor. It is called the "great processor": nature itself, the planet itself. The opening begins with the habitual confession — we do not know, the seventh continent is within us — but this time the end of the sentence is different: "We do not have much time left. Taking responsibility for the past, the present and the future is no longer optional." At the heart of the processor lie imaginings of the future: at the threshold of extinction, what might the future be?

The first scene belongs to two young climate activists. One is from the Fridays for Future movement, the other from Extinction Rebellion. Activism is shared not as a narrative but as an experience: at the Boğaziçi strike a cat sat among the placards and everyone played with it. In Sinop, children ran to the park after organising their own strikes. A small child looked at the camera and said, "I am a climate activist." In behind-the-scenes footage of video shoots everyone is laughing, being silly, having fun. Suddenly something goes wrong in a video — "I mixed it up" — and this clumsiness is part of the action too.

When we could be playing like children.

This sentence is both a slogan and a method.

Instead of being crushed under the weight of the climate crisis, finding joy in the struggle itself. Having fun at the strike, laughing in the action, being happy while spending time together. Children already know this — it is what adults need to learn. Both activists emphasise: we always managed, somehow, to enjoy it; we never gave up doing something together and making it fun. In one video, activists get passing drivers to honk their horns — but they do it for fun, not in gloom. In Sinop, filming suddenly began and a performance was born — unplanned, spontaneous. Being able to laugh together: the smallest but most precious part of the struggle.

THE GREAT PROCESSOR

The second voice belongs to a radio presenter — one of the most persistent voices on the climate crisis. To talk about the great processor they begin with a gorilla. Koko — a gorilla whom a psychologist spent years teaching sign language. Before the Paris climate summit, Koko's answer to the question "what will become of the world?": "I am flower. I am nature. I love people. But human is stupid. Nature needs repair. No time left." Koko passed away shortly afterwards, but the message lives on.

Then another wonder of the great processor: the white bellbird living in the Amazon can produce 125 decibels of sound to call its mate — as loud as a concrete drill. The discovery has just been published in The Guardian. Concrete was one of last week's topics, too; and that a male bird can make so tremendous a sound to attract a female — equal to a concrete drill's — is another of the extraordinary things the great processor has created. This bird, too, as one might expect, is endangered — like the great majority of species in the Amazon.

There seems to be nothing to do but act. This is very clear.

A line from the cover of a book by one of Extinction Rebellion's co-founders is quoted: "From this moment on, despair ends and tactics begin." Eleven years remain — by the calculation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A fifty percent chance of success. But this fifty percent is our last chance. And in this last chance, having fun while we rebel is a must — even Roger Hallam says so.

HOW TO BE A TARKAN FAN

The third scene begins from an unexpected place: 12 April 1993. The day Turkey's first internet connection was established through a joint project of ODTÜ and TÜBİTAK. In October of that same year, Tarkan, then just twenty-one, spends three weeks shut away in a studio in Istanbul and records the album "Acayipsin." The album contains a song: "Durum Beter" (Things Are Dire). Tarkan, set on doing something active about the climate, writes this song: flowers are not blooming, dust and smoke, hearts in danger, babies — the world is burning, the world is ending, think dark thoughts. The beginning of the internet age and the awareness of ecological collapse at the same moment. Our climate-change anthem had in fact been written long ago — in 1993, long before three and a half billion snaps were sent every day and three hundred hours of video uploaded every minute.

A curator and a director take the stage and share what they were thinking as they prepared their presentation: how we can escape from these troubles. Their questions are different: not whether the climate crisis exists or not — it does. Nor is persuading people a question they are asking right now — organisations like Açık Radyo, Extinction Rebellion and 350 already do this very well. The real question: constantly thinking about the climate crisis is wearing and exhausting; it drains you — which is why they try to talk about it by finding new methods: thinking up different ways of communicating, staying fresh all the time, keeping hope even when they feel hopeless, not losing heart even when they are afraid. How do we become Tarkan fans?

A video is dug up from the depths of YouTube: twenty-four people have watched it, and fifteen of those were probably them. "We found it and brought it for you," they say. A child asks their father questions about global warming — putting him to the test. As if he had learned it by heart, the father answers the last question with extraordinary calm: what is the worst-case scenario? "The collapse of industry, sky-rocketing food prices, mass famines and death." They have never heard anyone else say it so calmly. This calm is itself frightening and funny at the same time. The hall suddenly laughs, then falls silent, then laughs again. Images, videos and memes spreading rapidly on the internet play an effective role in climate crisis communication — popular culture, humour and absurd calm are new tools.

How do we become Tarkan fans in climate crisis communication?

Instead of being paralysed by fear, walking around the crisis. Sometimes it helps to look it straight in the eye; sometimes you have to walk around it. Everyone has to find what works for them.

THE HEROIC SNAIL

The fourth voice belongs to an academic who has come from Sweden, leaving their two small children with their partner. They work on climate justice. They begin their presentation by getting the hall to chant slogans: "What do we want? Climate justice! And when? Right now!" And they share an anecdote: when first-time chanters hear their own voice it sounds strange to them. As if it were cracking, as if it were thinning and crumbling away. Then, if you keep shouting, you realise your voice is getting lost among the other voices. Your voice is wrapped in the voice of a crowd that thinks as you do, and you melt into it. This voice is your voice as humanity.

I would rather be angry than sad.

They go back ten years: Copenhagen 2009. At the time they were part of a mobilisation that believed in the global climate regime, that believed in urgent solutions. Great hope, great collapse. The Danish government took extraordinary measures, activists on the streets were terrorised, many were put in cages, the summit produced no results. What was learned from this spectacular collapse? That we must not fall for the illusion that top-down international mechanisms like the Paris Agreement alone will solve the global climate crisis. In Naomi Klein's words: to change everything, we need everyone — but who is everyone, what is everything? These are the real questions.

The academic dissects ecomodernism. They start from the Marxist geographer Erik Swyngedouw's concept of the Cyborg City: cities today function as massive socioecological metabolisms — imagine Piccadilly Circus in London, human and nature intertwined, machine and living being inseparable. But ecomodernism presents this intertwining as a solution: the idea of destroying the monsters we have created with yet more monsters of our own making. Nuclear energy, carbon capture, geoengineering — all extensions of the same technological hubris, all carrying a high socioecological bill. Who will pay this bill? Ecomodernism's promise is not internally consistent.

So what is the alternative? Planned economic degrowth — questioning growth itself. When there is no growth, everyone sees catastrophe and cries crisis — but growth going on without limit is already the catastrophe itself. Eduardo Galeano's words: "Utopia is for walking. With every step it moves further away, but it keeps us walking." Real utopias need to be built on this idea; at every level — in the local neighbourhood, in regional networks, in planetary politics — radical revolutions are needed. In the story of the snail racing the battery-powered rabbit, the heroic snail is in fact a metaphor for an economy that shrinks but holds out. Starting from feminist author Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto — in a world where the boundaries between living things and machines have dissolved, will we build a new ecological approach, or march towards another catastrophe with the same technological hubris?

WE ARE THE OCEANS

The fifth voice comes from the seas — a critique of blue growth through the eyes of a political ecologist. "We couldn't do it on land, so let's open a new chapter at sea" — a new wave of growth spreading from the European Union to Asia-Pacific to Africa is targeting the oceans. But in the infographics, among the beautiful shapes, you will not see oil-soaked fish, destroyed marine habitats, displaced fishing communities.

The humanity we invoke when we speak of climate change is not a single entity — the individuals and groups within it do not bear the same responsibility and are not affected by the consequences in the same way. Large Norwegian and Spanish fleets have exhausted the fish stocks of their own seas. Through bilateral agreements they are coming to the shores of Senegal and Mauritania. Small-scale fishers both lose access to their resources and, when forced to migrate to Europe, are met with the response "your fish can come but you have no papers, you cannot enter."

Eco-refugee — a chain of injustice extending from seabed mining to the encounter of small Pacific island states with colonial industries. But there are those who resist.

The World Forum of Fisher Peoples has been organised since 1997; it works jointly with the farmers' movement. Women fishers — often not even recognised as fishers, yet involved in the entire production process. In Istanbul there are thirty-four fisheries cooperatives. What is a cooperative? Structures where one person has one vote, where political leadership matters. Some can sell fish directly; others cannot, because of disputes with the municipality. But there is a union — and this union has concrete plans such as direct sales, a cooperative shop model and a project to introduce fishers to the public. Links can be built with agricultural cooperatives — there are initiatives in Kadıköy, Koşuyolu, Beşiktaş. Agroecological production and consumption cooperatives are already working. Neighbourhood-level organising is critical and these models need to spread.

We Are the Oceans, We Are the Peoples.

FRAGMENTS OF TIME

The final performance belongs to an artist: starting from fictions of extinction, they collect memories from people — fragments of time. Small, fragile, forgotten moments. Someone remembers the first time they were called "abla" (big sister) in primary school: they had left the classroom late, a girl a year younger said, "abla, you've dropped your pen." The feeling of being a big sister for the first time — they have never been able to forget it. These memories will be carried into the future, transformed into new stories. While analysing what we have lost, the artist is also exploring how we can put what exists into action, how we can carry it to a point where it shapes things. A bridge from individual memory to collective future — the more memories you have that never came to light or were pushed aside, the richer the fiction of the future. At the closing, the traces of five weeks are gathered.

We talked about climate justice, we talked about extinction. We talked about the importance of biodiversity, climate strikes, the numbers taking to the streets growing in a single year from one to millions. The right of water to flow, the real cost of petrol, the gene pool of the potato, the bodies beneath concrete — and now the processor's imaginings of the future. An interactive collective played a "connection game" across the hall and gathered proposals for the future through social media: public fountains, communal compost areas, limits on construction, alternatives to take-away cups. Small, concrete practices that start in the neighbourhood. Someone asks: so why, after listening to so much dark talk from this morning until now, are we still here?

Why didn't we flee? The answer is simple and powerful: "If we were pessimists by nature, most of us would not be here right now. We would have run away, gone far off. We need to share happiness so that we find hope in one another and the strength to do something." That is why, really, everything that is done — especially on this subject — is a way of passing on to one another, with energy, the hope within us. This is how the Sindirim programme ends: five objects, five weeks, water-petrol-potato-concrete-processor — from everyday objects to the planetary crisis, from there to imaginings of the future, from there to the cooperative in the neighbourhood, from there to a connection game in the hall. The effort to bring together the artist's feeling, the researcher's fact, the igniting power of social movements — what birbuçuk has been saying from the beginning. People whose practices of production are too different for them ever to meet in the normal course of things come face to face and start talking. And the existence of this conversation, the existence of this gathering, is an action in its own right. We do not know what we are going to do — but not knowing is itself a starting point.

And at this starting point, playing like children, being angry, being a Tarkan fan, founding a cooperative, walking slowly but resolutely like a snail — all of it is possible at once. Perhaps the final word of the Sindirim programme is this: to exist joyfully in the midst of destruction.