by Gökçen Erkılıç
“For no two successive days is the shore line precisely the same.”
Rachel Carson
Did you recognize that the coastline of Istanbul is slowly changing? There is an ongoing disposition of urban materials between water and earth. The urban debris, the construction sites, and infrastructures shape the coast. “This is not a line” experiments a way of seeing like the city with the changing lines between water and land, among solid and fluid; shaped by humans. Different ecosystems of the land and water intersect, and often compete along the shoreline. Hydrologists call those spaces of tension, “ecotones.” The notion of ecotones adresses the conflicts of material displacements at the making of the coastal geography in Istanbul. Critical delineation of the coastline follows the alteration of the coastal strip and brings together geographic, architectural and journalistic representations. Spread over the city’s history of the past hundred years of visual colonization via aerial photography, aerial photographs, maps and satellite images are disassembled, blown up, and reframed in multiple montages. Coastal stories from the news are brought together with the images to follow displacement of water bodies and urban debris.
Results of the investigation show that the coastline has changed in the past decade more than it did in the past century. The natural port was dislocated. Infills replaced seascapes. Mudlands filled up quarries. Quarries morphed into post-modern entertainment landscapes. Water reserves dried. Former lake areas were flooded, ecosystems were displaced.
Sometimes there is an error in the map. Here, the cartography holds a material record of the changing coastline. The impact of humans on the planet has been rendered in divided representations that formed fractured worldviews increasingly. While political ecology, and its alter-versions, delved into the manifestations of flat ontology for humans as equal beings among wider ecosystems, habitats and urban systems; the conventional divisions between natural and cultural, urban and rural, human and nonhuman were. However, the tools to reimagine the urban edge condition remained obscure. “This is not a line” looks for a way of seeing the stratification of the coastal urban edge which equally becomes a political zone and a planetary common.
Duration: 06’51’’
Research and video: Gökçen Erkılıç
Sound design: Ahmet Ünveren
The video “This is not a line” was produced for Istanbul Unbound: Environmental Approaches to the City Conference in April 2021, as part of the “29,9 km” video series curated by “Birbuçuk” art and ecology collective. It monitors the material dispositions of Istanbul’s coastline by a cartographic montage. In the context of hyper extractivism, rapid infrastructural constructions and top down mega-projects that irreversibly altered Istanbul’s geography, it suggests a way of critically looking at the geographical alteration at the edge of land and sea through a counter-cartographic video narrative. It uses maps and aerial photographs as tools of witnessing the urgencies of urban political ecology.
Gökçen Erkılıç is an independent researcher, working at the intersection of urban studies with cartography, geography, and ecology. She has worked in various exhibitions, urban design projects and competitions as a conceptual designer and researcher. Her doctoral thesis “This is not a line: Critical Delineation of the Coastline in Istanbul” (2019) focused on the edge condition between the land and sea as a cartographic agent shaped by humans. In Coastliners Lab she produces experimental video narratives on critical water and land relations. She teaches on theory of urban ecology and its ways of video representation.
