Gökçen Erkılıç
A Tender Map-making Workshop: Imaginary Island
Dirty Drawings Wednesday Talks no.2 #05
March 11-18, 2023, 16.00 (GMT+3, Istanbul)
via Zoom
Meeting ID: 843 5516 9723
Passcode: 608083
Unlike maps that chart colonial matters, map-making is a tender practice. Maps can be private communication matters, self-written poems, and writings of personal memories. Have you ever identified yourself with a geographic place? Imagined yourself as a river? A cliff? A beach? Have you ever recorded a memory on a map? Did any map whisper a poem to you? This is a practice of making kinship with geographic places and their emotional translations on the surface of a map. We will make a map of an imagined island. We will explore ways of cartographic imagination with intimate collectivity. Drawing process will follow:
Delineations / Weaving - Naming / Place Making - Hatching / Meditating.
The process will be in company with reading texts and drawings/maps as references.
* For more information and application, send an email to [email protected] & [email protected] by March 08, 2023.
About Schedule
There will be two online meetings in one week as a start and final discussion. The process will be individual but in companion with an online collective sharing platform (Miro) to exchange works and words.
* Meeting on March 11, 2023
- Lecture / discussion - 1 hr
- Break
- Legend making - 1 hr
* Rituals of map-making / Demlenme
- / Everyday / Ritual / Dem / Music / Drawing Elements / Share / Log / Feedback
* Meeting on March 18, 2023
- Reviewing the atlas - participant talks - 1 hr
Gökçen Erkılıç, is an architect, cartographer, and video maker. Her works use mapping, video art, and cartographic history to investigate new methods of research in urban studies. She is focusing on political ecologies to articulate border conditions, material flows, and marginal narratives among humans and environment. Her mapping project “Coastline Atlas” charts infrastructures of land and water at contested waterscapes in the metropolitan region of Istanbul and its environs. She is currently working on mapping histories of Anatolia. Her video work This is not a line: Coastline as ecotone in Istanbul: flatland / landfill / whirlpool was exhibited in various exhibitions and events. She writes on mapping otherwise in various platforms.
She is currently a visiting researcher at Harvard University, Center for Middle Eastern Studies and teaching at Northeastern University College of Arts Media and Design. She graduated from Middle East Technical University Department of Architecture (2010), holds a master degree from Istanbul Bilgi University (2012) and was a fellow in Istanbul Studies Center (2017). Her doctoral dissertation at Istanbul Technical University, was entitled “This is not a line”: Critical Delineation of the Coastline in Istanbul” (2019).
About Dirty Drawings
The Dirty Drawings Wednesday Talks have been organized by Bilge Bal and hosted by Istanbul Kent University since Spring 2022. The no.2 series of five inter/national lectures and two workshops will occur between December 2022 and March 2023.
The Dirty Drawings no.2 will focus on an earthly imagination: modern essays through the act of drawing to read the simultaneity of the (un)built and natural ones as companions, to sense the design investigations on/ more than the human Anthropocene, the ecology of a changing Earth, and to cast cross-disciplinary research tools and collaborations beyond divisions.