Leading the “Speculative Fictions” research group for the Water Assemblies project felt, for me, like swimming at the threshold between waters I knew and waters I did not.

Speculative fiction was a field in which I felt relatively well-equipped through my academic work. Water-centered research, however, was new terrain for me, and my experience of facilitating workshops outside the academy, especially with participants from vastly different disciplines, was limited.

Although we had planned for a research group of twelve, forty-five people applied. I decided to include the thirty-five applicants who had responded to all of the questions I posed during the application process. I was deeply impressed by both their personal interests and the care and thought evident in their answers. I believed each person would bring a distinct perspective to the research. True to the name of the group, I believed in the importance of creating a space that could hold as many different perspectives and situated knowledges as possible. And that is exactly what happened. We shaped “Speculative Fictions” together.

Our project coordinators warned me about the potential risks of facilitating a workshop with thirty-five participants, yet they left almost every aspect of the research process to my initiative. At the same time, they anticipated that the group would naturally settle into more manageable numbers over time. They were right. I cannot say at which stage people left or how many attended each workshop, but the water flowed and found its course. By the end of the process, thirteen people remained who carried the work through with sustained care and commitment.

As I designed the research process, set to unfold from March to December, my academic reflexes immediately took over, and I put together an intensive program (which I now realize was shaped by a rather controlling, risk-averse impulse). Looking back at the first document outlining the process, I still cannot quite believe that we managed to realize almost everything in that draft schedule (the World Water Day panel on March 22 could not take place due to the events of March 19; had it gone ahead, I am certain many from our group would have attended 🤓 I was unable to attend İlyas Odman’s performance Yolluk for personal reasons, but several participants did, so it would be unfair to say the event did not happen 😅).

Additional meetings and workshops were woven into the program through participants’ own suggestions. Our WhatsApp group overflowed with event recommendations related to our theme. Even when we could not all attend together, different constellations formed within the group—pairs, trios, quartets—creating their own lines of connection.

I believe that “Speculative Fictions” became far more than an academic or artistic research centered on water. Although I may have been the facilitator on paper, we carried this process together with friends who devoted a significant portion of their time to a shared curiosity; who generously shared their skills, knowledge, and experience at every meeting; who made space for one another and remained open to learning from each other. Without their dedication, curiosity, and appetite, none of what I had envisioned would have held any meaning. I am deeply grateful to each and every one of them.

Tuesday, March 11
First Gathering

Our first meeting began with brief introductions, after which I shared my approach to speculative fiction. I had asked participants to bring an image/object and a text/quotation related to water. We spread all these materials across the table. Prior to the meeting, I had also selected thirty-five words from the Turkish translation of The Book of Human Emotions,1 each naming a particular feeling. I distributed these words among the participants and asked everyone to choose an image and a text brought by someone else. Each person then retreated to a corner and spent half an hour writing freely, guided by the emotion-word they had received and the associations evoked by the text and image they had picked up from the table. Those who received a Turkish word were asked to invent a word in an imaginary, non-existent language based on that word’s definition, while those whose word came from another language were asked to find a Turkish equivalent for it. After this half-hour of solitary writing, I divided the participants into pairs. For another thirty minutes, they showed one another the images and texts they were working with, sharing the associations and trajectories their writing had taken. Following these paired conversations, we reconvened as a larger group. Each pair shared the themes that had surfaced in their dialogue. Then, on the giant blackboards allocated to us on the ground floor of Salt Beyoğlu, we wrote down the emotion-words from the book alongside the words the participants had invented or translated in response. I asked everyone to upload what they had written during the session to our shared folder. Some shared their texts exactly as they had emerged in the workshop; others revised them a little before uploading.

While I had been feeling anxious about how such a workshop might unfold with thirty-five people, the “magical” moments participants described, especially within the paired dialogues, filled me with excitement. Both the distribution of emotion-words and the formation of pairs had been entirely random. Yet it turned out that some pairs had unknowingly received one another’s texts or images; in other cases, the emotion-words assigned to a pair were strikingly related, or the texts they wrote carried a shared emotional resonance. This sense of serendipity seemed to affect everyone deeply. What we had planned as a three-hour meeting came to an end only after four hours, simply because Salt Beyoğlu had to close. Even then, it felt as though everyone was ready to stay on for several more hours.

Wednesday, March 12
İsmail Gezgin, “The Story of Water from Mythology and Philosophy to Archaeology and Civilization”

Stretching from “the power of water to the water of power,” this talk2 with archaeologist, writer, and academic İsmail Gezgin provided a historical framework for the research, which adopts speculative fiction as a critical method.

Friday, March 14
Above the Clouds: Underground Performance

Although this performance did not place water at its center, I wanted to include it in our program because it was based on a text collectively produced in a storytelling workshop and because it articulated a speculative narrative world. Attendance was not mandatory, yet it captured the interest of many in the group, and we went to see it together. (In May, we also met separately with the creators of the performance, whose work I felt had an umbilical connection to our research group, and listened to them speak about their experience of creating the performance text.)

Saturday, March 15
Screening of Ali’nin Tabiatı [Ali’s Nature] and Conversation with Ezgi Hamzaçebi, Levent Çetin, and Çimen Günay Erkol

Following the screening of the film—focusing on the story of Ali and Meryem, the last representatives of a tradition in which fish are considered sacred and, after death, are wrapped in shrouds, prayed over, and buried in a cemetery reserved for fish—we held a discussion3 with the film’s director, Levent Çetin, academic Çimen Günay Erkol, and myself. In the conversation, we addressed alternative ways of being and acting from within what is considered traditional. Levent Çetin spoke about non-anthropocentric practices in Alevi culture and the concept of sacred ecology. Çimen Günay Erkol approached the film through the lens of critical masculinity studies, while I shared my observations and questions about the relationship between ecology and gender. Questions from the audience focused on the extent to which the film succeeds in moving beyond an anthropocentric perspective.

Tuesday, March 18
Second Gathering

In this meeting, we divided into several groups and revisited the key discussion topics that emerged in the events we had participated in. We held a kind of “digestive” conversation, moving from our impressions of the gatherings to the questions that lingered with us, and toward the areas where we felt a need for further research. The groups then reconvened, and for each event we compiled a set of keywords distilled from our discussions.

The World Water Day Panel scheduled for March 22 was cancelled due to the protests that began after Ekrem İmamoğlu was taken into custody on March 19.

In the days following March 19, I had no sense of whether or how the process could continue.
As I spent the final week of March in the hospital due to family health issues, I unfortunately couldn’t attend İlyas Odman’s performance Yolluk, which took place at Karga on March 25 and which I had imagined we would all go to together. Those who did attend, however, said it was deeply moving.

Saturday, April 19
Exhibition tour of Water Dragon with Eda Şarman and “Istanbul’s Water Heritage Tour”

We were able to come together again a month after our meeting on March 18. We first visited the solo exhibition of Eda Şarman, one of the participants in the research group, at Non.Sight, guided by the artist herself. Afterwards, using the audio guide featured in the “KarDes: Multicultural Memory Tours Guide” mobile application developed by the Hrant Dink Foundation, we followed a route through Istanbul’s water heritage—from Zeyrek Cistern to Çinili Hamam, from the Valens Aqueduct to Ayşe Sultan Fountain, and from Istanbul’s historical fire brigades to water carriers—visiting water structures embedded in the city’s memory.

Sunday, April 20
Studio visit with Serkan Aka

We visited the studio of Serkan Aka, who produces sound-based works using scrap and found objects. What led me to associate Serkan Aka’s practice with speculative fiction was his approach to objects as beings with their own lives and stories. During the studio visit, we first spoke with Serkan about his practice. He told us when and how his relationship with scrap materials began, and how this relationship intertwines with his craft and artistic production. He then showed us the works in his studio and the mechanisms behind them.

Sunday, May 11
Conversation with the Above the Clouds: Underground Team

We met the creators of the performance at Salt Galata. We shared our thoughts on the narratives of the performance; they, in turn, shared how they brought those narratives into being. We grew fond of both the performance—which sparked our imagination through its modes of storytelling and the questions it raised—and the team behind it.

Tuesday, June 10
Production Phase

We had reached a point where we needed to conclude the workshops and events that had been nourishing us, and decide what to do with what we had gathered from March to June. With the arrival of summer, it was uncertain who would remain in Istanbul and how often we would be able to come together. Before scattering in different directions, we held a meeting to think through how we would spend the summer. Those who could attend met at Salt Galata; others joined us online. Everyone shared the ideas they had in mind for the texts they would produce individually. The following decisions were made:

1. By the end of June, everyone would add a few sentences to our shared folder, outlining the theme of the text or visual they wished to produce. Those with similar ideas could also choose to work together.
2. By the end of June, everyone would select a being from The Book of Barely Imagined Beings4 and write the name and page number of their chosen being in the folder titled “Our Creature.” Later, each of us would take one limb of the being we had selected and create a collage. From these parts, we would collectively form an original creature to represent the group. Özge and Gökçe offered to support the collage process. Songül would then model and 3D-print the creature, which would become the main character of our stop-motion video.
3. By the end of July, everyone would complete their individual production—whether text, visual work, photography, video, or another form. During July, we would meet online at least twice to update one another on our processes. At the end of the month, everyone would upload their work to the folder titled “Productions.” We would then review all the works together and map the shared images, affective tones, and concepts that emerged across them. How this map would be integrated into the website would be discussed later. Songül offered to help with this. The landscapes and images appearing in these works would also serve as source material for the realms through which our creature would travel in the stop-motion video. The emergence, modeling, and printing of the creature would also need to be completed by the end of July. In addition, after reviewing one another’s works, each of us would attempt to weave an emotion, expression, or image from any chosen work into our own. In this way, what we produced would resemble islands connected to one another by threads. We would also try to visualize these modes of connection.
4. By the end of August, the stop-motion production process would begin. In the video, we would aim to depict our creature’s journey through the worlds we had created. The video would be accompanied by a polyphonic chorus, formed by voicing selected passages from our texts. We would also ask Serkan Aka to compose music for the video using his instruments. Özge and Gökçe said they could work on the stop-motion video, though the idea and scenes of the film would be developed collectively. It would be helpful to meet online at least three times in August to discuss the details. In addition, everyone would finalize their individual production by the end of August and communicate their requests to those responsible for translating the works into the website’s design. After that, the process would move beyond us: the editorial and design phases would begin 🥳

Thursday, July 3
Designing the Creature

In this meeting, we discussed which limbs of the creatures we had picked from The Book of Barely Imagined Beings we wanted to work with. Not all of the visuals in the book were clear or detailed, so Eda added additional images she had found beyond the book for each being to the “Our Creature” folder.

We decided to produce our hybrid creature across multiple media. With Songül, we talked through the idea of a 3D model/sculpture; with Gülsüm, a ceramic form; and with Eda, possibilities for a wearable costume and/or a digital collage.

We also agreed that we wanted to experience the production process together. For those who would be in Istanbul during July and August, we discussed starting production by visiting Gülsüm’s and Songül’s studios in Kadıköy. We decided to hold one-day workshops at Salt in the last week of July and at the beginning of August, and to collectively bring the creature to life.

At the same time, we agreed to complete the texts by the end of July; for everyone to read one another’s texts and take notes on shared threads by August 7; and during the week of August 7-14, to hold an online meeting where we would weave these commonalities together around images, affects, and concepts and discuss the structure of our video.

Sunday, July 27
Ceramic Workshop with Gülsüm Aküzüm

As planned, we held a workshop at Salt Galata under Gülsüm’s guidance to create the limbs of our creature. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend this workshop as I wasn’t in Istanbul at the time, but as you can also see from the photos, astonishing things emerged within just a few hours.

Friday, August 1
3D Sculpture Painting with Songül Girgin

Before the meeting, Songül and her partner, Aşan, had modeled and printed a 3D sculpture using our creature’s limbs. We met at Songül’s studio and painted our creature together. Prior to this meeting, a few of us went to the Friday market in Kadıköy and bought a large amount of fabric to use in our costume-making workshop.

Saturday, August 23
Conversation on the Texts

Before this meeting, everyone had read one another’s texts. During the gathering, we reflected on the shared images, ideas, and affects that emerged across them. In a document titled “The Weave of the Texts,” everyone wrote down what they felt connected the texts to one another. I deliberately do not specify who wrote which notes or which texts they relate to. Here are manifestations of our collective affect:

• Listening to, learning from, and telling the stories of women across generations
• The ethics of remembering and narrating
• Water as a space/image of memory, truth, and justice
• Water as a carrier of individual and collective memory
• Relationship with sacredness; following the trace of belief
• The relationship between dreams and truth
• Wishes, vows, sacrifice, the balance of giving and taking, fairness
• Continuity of life, cycles, ritual
• Sewing, weaving, lines
• Water and tree cults
• The fragmentation and fragility of memory
• Witnessing and memory
• Caring for memory: the effort to keep it from being lost, the effort to remember, the effort not to forget; resistant memory
• “Commemorating what has been forgotten”: how does one remember the forgotten? Gathering fragments, tracing, collecting, archiving
• The relationship between the devastation of water resources and the devastation of peoples and memory
• The destructive effects of water scarcity
• Connections between water scarcity/thirst and processes of erasure; stolen water/stolen memory, the loss of water/the loss of memory
• Finding one’s own ritual; following rituals; the importance of rituals for memory
• Other forms of sacredness
• Belonging to a place; being uprooted, torn away, displaced; those who are driven from place to place; the loss of home
• Those who search for a home throughout their lives, those who find a home nowhere
• Holding on, or failing to hold on, in the place of displacement
• Returning to where one belongs, “returning to the center,” or dispersing
• Finding direction
• Survival and resistance in the face of destruction
• The greening of a dried or burned tree, the sprouting of a dry branch, hope and resistance
• Earthly beings as seekers of shelter
• The turning of time, the turning wheel, the spiral
• Resilience, rituals of binding oneself to the cycle of life
• The creature: a being to trust, to take refuge in
• The loss and fragmentation of memory
• Beginning, memory, home
• The uncanny, the uncertain, the temporary, the ambiguous outside the absolute
• Being resilient/fluid, persisting, world-making
• The relationship between water and hope in a landlocked geography
• Dialectics, struggle, ethics
• The search for a new yet familiar universe
• New worlds, imaginaries beyond the present; what water recalls through curiosity for what lies behind everything, what unfolds, what grows
• Our ways of joining the collective; practices of reaching and amplifying our inner voice
• Roots, traditions, beliefs, and rituals that sustain hope; belief systems that honor nature and its cycles, shaping existence through their own values
• Ancient wisdom; intersecting branches of feminist ecology and sacred ecology; how the mother-daughter relationship contributes to rootedness and a return to roots
• Where does care and protection come from? From whom do we learn it?
• Do we respond in the same way when confronted with the truth of everything to which we ascribe sacredness?
• Water’s capacity to record is not discriminatory but inclusive. It does not only register what is pleasant, good, or orderly; it also holds pain, wounds that cannot be healed, fractures, insoluble sediments, and captivity. The myths woven around sorrowful and confined bodies are as much myths as water’s records are fluid.
• Anthropomorphic striving is never devoted to fate or becoming. It seeks to impose its own order on nature, despite nature. Even when too blinded to recognize the futility of its efforts, it refuses to relent. This refusal transforms its own life as well—something it also fails to notice. Water’s memory resists forgetting. Perspectives must be reconfigured. Our path lies with those who whisper to us that “a new, but in fact very old, order is necessary.”

Sunday, September 14
Mask Sewing Workshop with Eda Şarman

In this meeting, we began working with fabrics. We spent the first hour thinking through what we would sew and how we might use the fabrics in the video. It was a productive and rewarding process of thinking together. We decided to make masks using the fabrics and began designing the masks, though not all of them were completed. Everyone started imagining forms based on their own texts and the materials at hand. We also planned our video shoot day and mapped out the flow of the shoot. I outlined everyone’s tasks leading up to the filming day as follows:

• Everyone will select excerpts from their texts that they wish to read aloud, each about 30 seconds long. Together, we will turn these into a single collage text.
• The masks will be completed. (There will be no separate meeting for this; with Eda’s support, we can work either in her studio or individually at home.)
• In the video, we will first hear clear, distinct voices, each person reading the excerpt they selected from their own text. Toward the end of the video, we will include the collage text, with each of us reading it consecutively at intervals of 2-3 seconds. As each new voice enters, the sounds will gradually turn into a cacophony. At the same time, the visuals will grow more complex, layered, and/or accelerated, and the video will end abruptly at a heightened pitch.

Sunday, October 12
Video Shooting

We had devised such a clear flow on September 14 that, when we came together again on October 12, we were able to realize everything we had imagined almost immediately.

We gathered around a long table in Workshop IV at Salt Galata. Spread across it were fabric scraps, the masks we had sewn, notes we wanted to reference from our first research group meeting, as well as books, notebooks, and various objects. Wearing the masks we had made, we sat down at the table one by one. As we interacted with the objects, Metean Bars, who was supporting us with photography and video, captured close-up footage, while another camera remained fixed for wide shots. Since everyone would also voice a 30-second excerpt from their own text for the video, each of us was filmed individually as well.

Sunday, October 26
Sound Recording

During this meeting, we first filmed the masked 30-second segments of those who had been unable to attend the shoot day. We then recorded everyone reading the selected excerpts. In addition, I had created a collage text from passages I had chosen from everyone’s writing, and we recorded all of us reading it together.

November 21-25
Video Editing Session

The editing of our video was undertaken by two members of the research group, Eda Şarman and Hazar Çavaş. With the support of Metean Bars, they completed the editing over two sessions at Salt Galata.

December
Sound Design and Audio Editing

Musician Fuat Çağlar Aytan supported us in composing the video’s music and editing the audio recordings.

In this way, alongside the workshops and gatherings we held from March to December, the “Speculative Fictions” research group produced thirteen individual texts, fabric masks, two hybrid creatures, and an experimental video born of collective effort. Seeing the “outputs” of a process is, of course, deeply gratifying; but for me, what mattered far more was weaving this entire process together, stitch by stitch, through our shared labor.

***

Participants: Berna Akdeniz, Gülsüm Aküzüm, Pınar Aygün, Nesrin S. Brown, Özge Can, Meliha Coşkun, Hazar Çavaş, Merve Duran, Songül Girgin, Nihan Somay, Gizem Sözen, Eda Şarman, Gökçe Tanrıkulu
English Translations: Öznur Karakaş