Agency of Nature, Nature as Infrastructure
Paulo Tavares, Merve Bedir, Merve Yücel. “We focus on epistemology and knowledge production from within the plural cosmologies that create a certain place; on the one hand, understanding their contradictions, and on the other, trying to reproduce further vocabularies through the complexities of the place. We hope this allows us to rethink the infrastructures that impose certain forms of comprehension, experience, ways of living, and use of that place. We would like to learn from perspectives that undo extractivist epistemologies and reimagine water (and nature) as co-author of knowledge.” Architect, author, and educator Paulo Tavares and architect Merve Bedir will be in conversation on how local knowledge, whether rooted or migrated, can inform practices envisioned as adaptive, relational infrastructures rather than imposed systems. Moderated by architect and researcher Merve Yücel, the discussion will explore the following questions: What are the ways of researching on/with the agency of nature, environment, cosmos, and commons, without reducing them to resources to be extracted, quantified, or managed? These could be methodologies that allow us to remain attentive to the contradictions embedded within a place—contamination, forced displacement, erasure, uneven development—while still learning from its knowledge systems. How can methodologies be both revealing violence and generative of different worlds? And how can we approach infrastructures that operate simultaneously at the household, neighborhood, river basin, and planetary scales in ways that connect local knowledge to planetary issues, or conversely, provincialize the planetary—bringing abstractions like “climate crisis” or “global infrastructures” back into the lived, contested terrains of the local? This conversation is organized as part of “Wetness“—one of the five research strands in Water Assemblies—which explores the social and ecological architecture of water beyond colonial and patriarchal systems, reimagining it as a heterogeneous entity deeply connected to our bodies, collective practices, and everyday spaces. The free-admission program will be held in English with simultaneous translation to Turkish.
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