Water embodies and creates “relations of care and desire” before its conception as a chemical abstraction of mere resources and energy. Formless yet essential to shaping life, water unveils layers of social and environmental histories, always finding its way through flows, leaks, and cracks.

In this group, we approached water as a heterogeneous agent deeply entangled with bodies, collective practices, shared spaces, and everyday life, and sought to explore its social and ecological layers. Through the dialectic of governance and control versus commons and negotiation, we traced water’s place in individual and collective memory, its material traces in the physical environment, and its established definitions, while investigating its overt meanings and implicit spatial dynamics.

In shaping the research, we drew on Anna Tsing’s more-than-human anthropology, Masao Adachi’s landscape theory, and Gökçe Günel and Chika Watanabe’s patchwork ethnography. We followed practices of care, repair, destruction, and creation enacted by beings in relation to and through water. We questioned notions of measure and scale, chose to work between them, and moved forward under the guidance of companions who brought different forms of knowledge, perception, and experience. We consulted relevant dictionaries and encyclopedias, immersed ourselves in novels, poetry, and mythologies, and committed ourselves to remaining open to the languages and dialects of Anatolia.

We carried out our work both online and in person over the course of a year, at irregular intervals. Some of us traveled as part of the project, while others remained where they were. During these trips, we conducted more in-depth work in and around Salt Beyoğlu in Istanbul and around the METU Campus and Lake Eymir in Ankara. Between March 8-18, we documented what we did at Salt Beyoğlu in real time and presented it to those who visited the research office. During those days, some of us became “like water,” drifting through Cihangir and Vezneciler. The work we had planned to carry out at METU took place on May 3, following a series of open lectures and forums held on campus that focused on democracy and rights.

At Salt Beyoğlu, we sought to understand the control of water in all its dimensions. We followed the designed infrastructural systems through which water enters the building, is stored, circulated, monitored, and regulated, as well as the information-processing procedures through which humidity levels are measured and analyzed, and management systems tested accordingly. We documented these processes through photography, photogrammetry, on-site marking, humidity measurement, and imaging technologies.

Participants each contributed concepts associated with water. Alongside memories, everyday life, place-based knowledge, traditions, and collective knowledge, we drew on dictionaries, encyclopedias, novels, travel journals, and the participants’ own research. We compiled concepts, discussed them, and traced the patterns that emerged when they were brought together. Some of these concepts were embroidered onto fabric. Stitching, basting, and patching connected the different things we did as ways of working and thinking collectively.

The exchanges we shared with visitors to the research office were accompanied by presentations by Mehmet Kentel on Beyoğlu’s “wet” history1 and by Paulo Tavares on the sky rivers of the Amazon forests, their rituals, and fluid pedagogies.2 In Ankara, Emre Alp explained how water finds its way from rural areas to the city, from lake to campus. We descended into water reservoirs and wells; then we found ourselves among the campus streams, pools, and fountains.

In Ankara, students from METU’s Department of City and Regional Planning met with participants from Istanbul. Beginning with the question, “Where does METU’s water come from?”, we explored the Eymir–Mogan watershed and the wells and reservoirs supplying water to the campus. We spoke with staff who have worked there for years about everything from chlorination to pressure tanks. We walked along the meager streams and visited the dry fountains and pools on campus. Reflecting on the task of bringing water to the campus, the publicness of water and its relationship to public space, and the rural–urban continuum, we produced a shared, scaleless map. We continued embroidering the fabric we had begun in Istanbul by stitching Ankara’s water geographies onto it. The Ankara study enabled us to understand water’s controlled and semi-controlled forms at the urban periphery.

Over the summer, we began bringing together the concepts we had collected and their definitions, acknowledging those who had shared or introduced them. We questioned the nature of these concepts and perceptions of their sources. We discussed, through the lens of subjectivity, whether each concept, together with its semantic counterpart, could find a place within the cosmology we were assembling. An editorial sub-group emerged during this process to review the concepts, their equivalents, and the multimedia materials proposed to represent them. We gathered participants’ observations and experiences, what had accumulated in our collective memory, the associations the concepts evoked, drawings, visuals, sounds, and videos in a shared folder. In this way, we began to form a water cosmology. We discussed the conditions and conditionings that inform the meanings of concepts, the questions and problems we sought to scrutinize, and the paths and methods that excited us. As people engaged in diverse fields such as urbanism, sociology, art, and design, we acknowledged the constraints that working with words entails. Our aim was not to produce an inward-looking, orderly, linear dictionary or an etymological study, but to attempt to understand, feel, and convey the bodily and semantic worlds created by water with all their complexity. Here, we wish to recall once more the methods of basting and patching.

Grounded in water’s relationality and drawing on concepts used by those who engage with water beyond dominant worldviews, our study evolved into a cosmology in which water became the primary agent. Our aim of understanding water’s variable and relational agency found expression in seven nodal concepts: “water structures/carriers,” “water words/sayings/actions,” “water geographies,” “states of water,” “water commons,” “the anthropomorphization of water,” and “water memory/temporalities.” These nodal concepts were not intended to establish a hierarchy of meanings; rather, they emerged from the need to trace how concepts connect with one another and to follow their interwoven meanings and patterns.3

Initiated by Merve Bedir and Duygu Cihanger Ribeiro, “Wetness” grew through the ideas of its participants and was shaped by the editorial contributions of Türkan Oya Ekmekci, Elif Hant, and Merve Yücel. Our work may be understood not so much as an attempt to redefine water, but as an effort to produce a knowledge of water. In this sense, it may contribute to building an infrastructure for water memory and to generating knowledges for living with water rather than managing it. The work we carried out through fabric and embroidery demonstrates that knowing operates not through intellect alone, but through the body and the senses, perception, intuition, and emotion—by refining and deepening understanding through being together and working together. We would like to emphasize that this process has been slow and multidirectional. Whenever we accelerated, we realized that there were stitches we might have skipped, missed, or overlooked, and we tried to move forward by revisiting and revising our work. Even so, addressing our mistakes and the stitches we have missed will remain an essential part of this ongoing work. The cosmology may evolve into studies of language production, use, and translation, or open onto different geographical, cultural, and historical dimensions through the “water stories” brought by (new) participants. By invoking words, we wish to recall what we need to know about the paths, methods, and strategies developed to protect water and ensure its fair use and distribution. Through this work, we therefore hope to engage institutions working on water planning and management. We also hope it can serve as a point of departure for discussions and research that bring the water consumption of cultural and design institutions into focus.

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Editorial Group: Merve Bedir, Duygu Cihanger Ribeiro, Türkan Oya Ekmekci, Elif Hant, Merve Yücel
Participants: Sevgi Aka, Özgür Atlagan, Ayşenaz Ayral, Ahmet Haktan Canpolat, Esra Çelikoğlu, Samet Çetak, Murat Çetinkaya, Berfin Sinem Demir, Cemal Anıl Doğan, Türkan Oya Ekmekci, Yadigar Esin Esen, Elif Hant, Sithu Hlaing, Özge Naz Kamiş, Tomiris Kemelova, Doğa Kısa, Elmira Shafiei Matanagh, Leyla Novrouzova, Esma Şanda, Selen Oğuz, Zeynep Deniz Ögdül, Muhammed İkbal Öztekin, Öner Taylan Öztürk, Esra Nur Peker, Başak Pınar, Yağmur Söker, Eren Yaman, Hülya Yavaş, Emina Azra Yılmaz, Asya Yiğit

This work is open-ended and intended to grow through the contributions of its participants. To join the research group or to share suggestions and contributions, please send an email to forum@saltonline.org.