Tactile gazes, finger-like eyes, belly-like ears:
(un)able to see through the same eyes (workshop), 2026, w/İpek Avanoğlu and Bahar Avanoğlu

Participants: Ahmet Oruç, Başak Başkaya, Bora Şahin, Burcu Uysalar, Defnenaz Öztürk, Eren Karaman, Lavin Gültekin, Maryam Atakishizada, Melek Zeynep Köse, Perihan Bilge Duru, Salim Kavuzlu, Serra Yaman, Tara Schroeder, Tuna Büyükaşık, Tuğçe Kırkpınar, Uğur Yaşar, Yiğit Kaçmaz, Zeynep Didem Ekşi and Zeynep Karabal

This workshop takes place in Sazlıdere—a place both near and far—where profit-driven actions intersect with the stories of a transforming landscape. A gathering of diverse and fragmented interdependent senses - eyes, ears, fingers, tentacles, bellies, legs, and tongues -  strives to approach these stories through embodied skills. Somewhere between knowing and not knowing, these eyes, ears, fingers, tentacles, bellies, legs, and tongues shift the subjectivities, recording the transforming gazes—and the states of knowing and not knowing.

Positioning ourselves within the multiple ecologies of the Sazlıdere Basin—a landscape undergoing continuous transformation driven by a human-centred perspective—the workshop aims to cultivate a mode of interrelationing across multiple bodies, times, scales, narratives, and senses. It proposes a series of experiments that seek, record, and imagine ways of situating oneself within the Sazlıdere Basin through drawing. As the acts of searching and recording multiply alongside the place itself—engaging the diverse senses of various bodies—drawing is envisioned as a collective, partial, and momentary manifestation of a more-than-human world. It invites participants to think through drawing—moving beyond dominant sensory modes—about the ways of situating oneself that emerge in that specific place and moment, in dialogue with the basin’s multiple ecologies.

What multiplies as birds, reedbeds, the concrete stream, the wind, the scent of earth, and construction noises gently touch us; as the landscape transforms, waves ripple, ants carry their loads, birds take flight, and the ears of the land begin to sprout?