Leads : Nishat Awan & Pelin Tan

Participants : Ishita Sharma (Researcher, PhD), Serif Toka (urbanist, PhD), Mezra Oner (urban planner, MA), Yildiz Tahtaci (MA, Urban Planner), Yelta Kom (MA, architect), Ruken Aydogdu (architect), Maria Dada ( post-doc, Digital Design), Lena Saraj ( Researcher), Asim Rafiqui (Researcher, PhD), Helen Brewer (Researcher, PhD).

Territory is a process not a product, and its “entangled matter formation” can force us to face the unthinkable and its experience of conflict zones. The unthinkable representation is about the fluid and entangled matters of formation of territories that forces us to think of transversal visual methodologies and narratives of decolonization. Does the unthinkable precede the entangled matters of infrastructures in/under conflict zones of territories? The question of the post-anthropocenic formation of conflict zones simultaneously puts forward the question of infrastructures of territorial control and multiple means of the colonial too. When ecological resource infrastructures are used as a means of colonization and weaponization of land; the result is forced migration and dispossession, damaging landscape and its local flora. The effects of climatic transformation on territories are not based only on determinist ecological factors. Rather, the production of infrastructure in general can function as an ecological legitimization for implanting security tools in conflict zones, for example; for dispossessing communities of agricultural lands and for surreptitiously colonizing territory. A relational ontology that structures the entanglement from the migrants flux to infrastructural projects, may enter as and may provide an aesthetic tool of responsibility. The workshop is based on field research cases, lectures, focus group and other methodologies that leads to a platform of mapping territory. The workshop is a collaboration between Topological Atlas and Arazi Research Assembly.

Keywords: Mapping, territory, infrastructure, borderline, methodology, anthropocene