birbuçuk

WHILE THERE IS PLAY LIKE CHILDREN

The last gathering. The fifth object. Water, petrol, potato, concrete — and now 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 an option." The processor's centre is imaginings of the future: at the threshold of extinction, what can the future be?

The first scene belongs to two young climate activists. One from the Friday Climate Strike 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 — Masal — looked at the camera and said "I am Masal Ocak. I am a climate friend." 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, the way I filmed it makes the camera go like that" — and this inexperience is also part of the action. While there is play 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 — what adults need to learn is this. Both activists emphasise: we always managed to take pleasure in some way; we never abandoned doing something together, taking it to a fun dimension. In a video shot in Russia, activists get passing drivers to honk their horns — but they do this not despondently but with enjoyment. In Sinop they went to the cinema, a camera was suddenly produced, a performance was born — unplanned, spontaneous. Being able to laugh together, the smallest but most valuable part of the struggle.

THE GREAT PROCESSOR

The second voice belongs to a radio presenter — one of the most persistent voices of the climate crisis. To talk about the great processor they begin with a gorilla. Coco — a gorilla that an anthropologist taught sign language over years of work. Before the Paris climate summit, asked "what will become of the state of the world," Coco's answer: "I am flower. I am nature. I love people. But human is stupid. Nature needs repair. Time is running out." Shortly after, Coco passed away but the message continues. Then another wonder of the great processor: the white bellbird living in the Amazon can produce 125 decibels of sound to call its mate — equivalent to a concrete drilling machine. This discovery was just published in The Guardian. Last week's topics included concrete; that a male bird equal in sound to the noise of a concrete drill can produce such a prodigious sound to attract a female is one of the extraordinary things the great processor creates. This bird lives in the Amazon and, as one might expect, is in danger — like the great majority of species in all of the Amazon.

Nothing appears to be done except action. This is very clear.

A cover quote from the Extinction Rebellion founder's book is cited: "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 while rebelling in this last chance it is necessary to have fun — even Roger Hallam says this.

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 the October of that same year, a then twenty-one-year-old Tarkan locks himself in a studio in Istanbul for three weeks and records the album "Acayipsin." The album contains a song: "Durum Beter" (Situation is Worse). Tarkan, having pursued actively doing something 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, gloomy thoughts. The beginning of the internet age and the awareness of ecological collapse at the same moment. Our climate anthem was actually written long ago — in 1993, long before 3.5 billion snaps were sent daily, before three hundred hours of video were uploaded per 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. Persuading people is also not a question they are currently asking — 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 tiring, consuming — which is why they try to talk about it by finding new methods. Thinking about different communication methods, staying constantly fresh, preserving hope even when hopeless, not being daunted even when afraid. How do we become Tarkan fans?

A video is produced from the depths of YouTube: twenty-four people have watched it, fifteen of them probably themselves. "We found it and brought it for you," they say. A child is asking their father questions about global warming — putting their father to an examination. The father answers the last question as if memorised, with extraordinary calm: what is the worst scenario? "The collapse of industry, sky-rocketing food prices, mass famines and death." No other mouth has been heard that can say this with such calm. 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, absurd calm are new tools.

How do we become Tarkan fans in climate crisis communication?

Instead of being paralysed by fear, circumnavigating around it. Sometimes looking directly into the eye of the crisis feels good; sometimes one needs to circumnavigate it. Everyone needs to find what is good for them.

THE HEROIC SNAIL

The fourth voice belongs to an academic — come from Sweden, leaving two small children with their partner. Working 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 cracking, as if becoming thin and crumbling. If you continue shouting you realise your voice is getting lost among the other voices. Your voice is enveloped by the voices of the crowd thinking the same things; you dissolve. This voice is your voice as humanity.

Let us prefer to be angry rather than proper.

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

The academic puts ecomodernism on the table. Starting from the concept of Cyborg City of Marxist geographer Erik Swyngedouw: cities today function as massive socioecological metabolisms — imagine Piccadilly Circus in London, human and nature intertwined, machine and living inseparable. But ecomodernism presents this intertwining as a solution: the idea of destroying the monsters we have created with the monsters we have again created. 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, calls it crisis — but the unlimited continuation of growth is itself already catastrophe. Eduardo Galeano's words: "Utopia serves walking. With every step it recedes further, 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 actually the metaphor for the shrinking but resisting economy. 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 this on land, let's open a new page 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 cannot see oil-soaked fish, destroyed marine habitats, displaced fishing communities.

When the climate crisis is spoken of, the concept called humanity 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 in 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, encounter 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 island states in the Pacific with colonial industrialists. But there are those who resist.

The World Forum of Fisher Peoples has been organised since 1997; it works in solidarity with the farmers' movement. Women fishers — often not even recognised as fishers but involved in the entire production process. In Istanbul there are thirty-four fisheries cooperatives. What does cooperative mean? Structures where one person has one vote, where political leadership matters. Some can make direct fish sales, some cannot due to disagreements with the municipality. But there is a union — and this union has concrete plans such as direct sales, cooperative shop models, projects to introduce the fisher. 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 extinction fictions, collecting 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 one year younger said "abla, your pen dropped." The feeling of being a big sister for the first time — they will never forget it. These memories will be carried into the future, transformed into new stories. The artist researches how what exists can be brought to action points and shaping moments, while simultaneously analysing what we are losing. A bridge from individual memory to collective future — the more unlived or set-aside memories you have, the richer the future construct. 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 going out onto the streets growing in one year from a handful to millions. The right of water to flow, the real cost of petrol, the genetic pool of the potato, the bodies beneath concrete — and now the processor's imaginings of the future. An interactive collective has played a "connection game" across the hall, gathering proposals for the future from participants: public fountains, communal compost areas, construction limitations, alternatives to take-away cups, cooperative shops. Small, concrete, practices beginning from the neighbourhood. Someone asks: so why, after listening to so many dark conversations from this morning to this hour, are we still here?

Why didn't we flee? The answer is simple and powerful: "If we were of a pessimistic character, most of us would not be here right now. We were fleeing, moving away. We need to share happiness so that we find hope from each other and find the strength to do something." That is why everything done — especially on this subject — is to pass the hope within us to one another energetically. Sindirim programme ends this way: five objects, five weeks, water-petrol-potato-concrete-processor — starting 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 who are in production practices too different to normally come together meet face to face and begin to talk about things. And the existence of this conversation, the existence of this gathering, is itself an action. We do not know what we are doing — but not knowing is 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 are possible simultaneously. Perhaps the final word of the Sindirim programme is this: to exist joyfully in the midst of destruction.