SAHA Talks: Arazi Assembly | Entangled Topographies

1 March 2025, Saturday

3 pm – 4:30 pm

SAHA Studio | İMÇ No.5538

Talk: Arazi Assembly

Merve Gül Özokcu 

Leyla Keskin

Pelin Tan

Moderation: Sema Aslan

Arazi Assembly (Merve Gül Özokcu, Leyla Keskin, Pelin Tan) will hold a talk at SAHA Studio on Saturday, March 1, at 3:00 PM, moderated by Sema Aslan. The discussion will focus on how research can be conducted in a fluid and unconditional conflict zone, the rights of more-than-human ecology, research methodologies in the field of socio-spatial justice, and the relationship between these methodologies and artistic research.

Arazi was supported by the SAHA Sustainability Fund in 2022 and 2025.

About Arazi Assembly

Arazi, a research assembly consists of researchers that are working together in different spatial scales focusing on the Southeast region of Turkey. With urban and architectural backgrounds, the researchers’ trajectory questions of how any scale of infrastructure as an agency does functions and creates an assemblage of entities that re-structures and colonizes the territory.

Arazi considers collective research as a form of knowledge production of decolonization, care and solidarity. Arazi aims to understand and develop uncommon methodologies of architecture, urbanism and territorial research.

Merve Gül Özokcu is an architect, researcher, and activist focusing on the commons and eco-feminist narratives. Her participatory projects and creative actions with Architecture For All prioritize interventions that take a social impact and proactive on-site approach to political-based problems. She is part of the Arazi Assembly, a research collective that considers knowledge production as decolonization, care, and solidarity. She received her master's degree with her “Alternative Processes and On-Site Performance in Architecture Education and Practice” thesis. Her participatory research, Women Narrative Spaces, which she conducted with women from different geographies, starting from her grandmother, was supported by IASPIS Studio and the IKSV Design Resilience Programme. The works she is a part of have been exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago, V&A Museum, MAXXI, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Venice Architecture Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul Design Biennial, and Ngbk Berlin.

Leyla Keskin is an artist living and working in Mardin. She works on art pedagogy, space, memory and ecological identity. She received her master's degree with her thesis ‘Representation of ecological mourning in documentary cinema: The case of Hasankeyf’ (2022), in which she documented the solidarity practices on the land and the rivers against the Ilısu dam and its dispossession consequences in Hasankeyf and the Tigris river basin. She aims to produce knowledge using an unconventional methodology, to reproduce and archive her practices, and to develop sharing areas. Her short film ‘Şin’ on ecological mourning has been shown in Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Germany. She is a member of the Arazi Assembly and a CADSR 2024 researcher. Some exhibitions and workshops she participated in are ‘Ecologies of Making Worlds’ (University of Applied Arts Vienna, 2024), Sediment (Rotor Contemporary Art, 2024), Den Tunna Skorpan (2024), Flora of Misi (Nazım Hikmet Culture House, 2023), Entangled Topographies (17th Istanbul Biennial, 2022), Reclaiming Climate Justice Summit(Systemic Justice Climate Justice, 2024).

Pelin Tan works on threshold dwelling and infrastructures, Tigris River phenomenologies, and cosmologies of localities. She received the Keith Haring Award for Art and Activism in 2019. Tan completed her doctoral study on socially engaged art and the concept of locality. She is a faculty member at Batman University, Fine Arts. Roemer Fellow Orient Inst.Beirut, Lebanon. Currently, her film Gilgamesh: She Who Saw the Deep / Gilgamêş: Ewe ku kûrahî dît is in the exhibition Pre-architecture at the CIVA Brussels (2024-25). The documentary Landscapes as Archive on Palestinian spatial production was exhibited at the Ramallah Qattan Foundation (2023). Exhibitions: Istanbul Biennial (2007, 2015, 2021), Montreal Biennial (2013), Bergen Assembly (2013), Lisbon Architecture Triennial (2014), Istanbul Design Biennial (2021), Beijing Art Biennial (2023), Oslo Architecture Triennial (2016) and others. She is a member of Artık İşler collective and Arazi Assembly. Tan is a co-curator and co-editor of Urgent Pedagogies (IASPIS). Author of Forms of Non-belonging (e-flux books, Sternberg, MIT Press, 2025), Unconditional Hospitality (2025, dpr-barcelona).

Sema Aslan (b. Berlin, 1978) studied sociology and communication and worked as a journalist. From the interview book, My Books / 35 Names 35 Libraries (2009) was published by Doğan Kitap. Her novels Kozalak (2012), The World's Appearance to Kasım (2021) and A Me in the Wide Land (2024) were all published by İletişim Publications. Her children’s book, I Can't Find the Heart of the City!(2017, İletişim) was selected for the White Ravens Catalog, a publication of the International Youth Library (Internationale Jugendbibliothek). The World in Topur (2019, İletişim), I Think I'm Rustling!(2020, İletişim) and Tiny (2024, Redhouse Kidz) are other published children's books.