The cycle of seasons, the movement of planets and magma, the sediments accumulating in cisterns, disasters accelerated by climate breakdown, the water capacity of dams... All of these carry water’s past and future layers; memory and possible futures converge here.
The study began with the curiosity to explore water’s variable relationality and to identify the concepts used by those who engage with water beyond dominant worldviews. It evolved into a cosmology in which water became the primary agent, with all concepts either carrying water or coming together along its path. This cosmology is grounded in fieldwork conducted at Salt Beyoğlu, on the METU Campus, and around Lake Eymir, as well as in everyday life, local expressions, personal and collective stories, and dictionaries and sources that do not (or cannot) find a place in the mainstream.
We organized the cosmology around the nodal concepts of “water structures/carries”, “water words/sayings/actions,” “water geographies,” “states of water,” “water commons,” “the anthropomorphizing of water,” and “water memory/temporalities.” These nodal concepts were not intended to create a hierarchy of meanings by categorizing words or concepts. Rather, they arose—initially through intuition—from a desire to question our evolving approach to understanding and knowing. They can be read as open, revisable, and evolving threads that enable us to trace the affinities between words and the paths through which they relate to one another. Additions and omissions remain possible. The words within the cosmology may point to more than one nodal concept and/or relate to one another through different nodal concepts. In this way, the corporeality of water and the words that reflect it continue to shape our worlds of meaning and imagination.
Our work may provide an infrastructure for generating knowledge for those who seek not to manage water but to live with it; it may offer a fragmented and layered narrative of water’s memory. Ab, çur (ջուր), mayo, av, avdır, and ayn are some of the words for water in the languages of this geography. Although we were initially interested in such translations, in the first stage we chose not to search for direct equivalents. Instead, we focused on the personal and collective stories that reveal our relationships with water, and on water’s presence throughout life and across bodies. We proposed pursuing more detailed work on translation and language in later stages of the research.
Questions of climate breakdown, modernity, capitalism, property regimes, class relations, and access to and dependence on water show that our ways of understanding and knowing water need to change. In this sense, approaching design as both space and language, attending to rural–urban relations, everyday life, the commons, thresholds, critically examining the discipline itself, returning to water, and thinking through water’s memory may all serve as points of orientation.
As the editorial group, after working through all the words brought together by the participants, we collectively discussed, researched, and evaluated the nodal concepts we developed in relation to the initial aim of the study and the paths it followed. In addition to those listed above, our initial nodal concepts included water actors, water measures and scales, water thresholds, water bastings, water stitchings, water patches, water-less(ness), the liberation of water, the domestication of water, the taming of water, and the gendering of water.
One of the topics we discussed was water actors: those who attend to water, care for it, protect it, live with it, and labor with it; in order words, bathhouse masters, technicians, migrant workers, birds, algae, and other human and more-than-human beings. Their perspectives shape the meaning of water and reconfigure social water geographies. From this point of departure, as we focused both on the importance of foregrounding water’s agency and on critiquing hierarchies of knowledge related to water, we initially found it meaningful to address figures who manage water, such as Kemal Kurdaş, Mimar Sinan, and Castelnau,1 within the gendering section, and to situate patriarchy’s influence on knowledge and practice along an epistemological axis. Later, however, by examining the place of human-centered actors within a water-centered cosmology, we removed the gendering section and redistributed water-centered actors across other nodal concepts.
Another issue we examined was the association of water with images of femininity, fertility, and care. This gendering becomes even more pronounced in structures such as hammams, ayazmas, or basins. The gendering of water is tied not only to femininity but also to care labor and invisible social burdens; a feminist reading renders these dimensions visible. While this approach encourages us to consider water as the primary agent, practices of gendering, taming, and domestication can obscure the emphasis we seek to place on water’s agency, directing us instead toward ways of thinking that seek to control water’s sources, routes, and distribution, turn it into an object of consumption, or optimize it for human use. Recognizing that such perspectives risk reducing water to a passive element, we turned toward pluralistic notions of agency and realized that we could think through both water’s agency and our own agency in relation to water. With this shift, we removed the nodal concepts of gendering, liberation, taming, and domestication; we incorporated water measures and scales, as well as water thresholds, into the nodal concept of “states of water,” and water-less(ness) and water actors into the nodal concepts of “water commons” and “water geographies.”
In meetings between the editorial and design teams, the question of how the work should be named came up repeatedly. Rather than adopting a comprehensive, dictionary-like approach that would reproduce and extend a dominant worldview, we embraced a cosmological approach aimed at understanding, sensing, perceiving, and grasping the universe(s) of water. We also came to think that creating a dictionary of “water”—a relational and mutable being in itself—was impossible; instead, we converged around a collective, plural, evolving, and unfinished form. We accepted as both an opportunity and a constraint the complex questions raised by how a concept is expressed in Kurdish or another language or why it may be misspelled; the representation of different languages of Anatolia; onomatopoeic expressions and sounds recognized as words; the relationship between words and cultural hegemony; and the ways in which concepts shape perception and understanding. Another constraint was the fact that when we came together, we spoke different languages, both linguistically and disciplinarily, and therefore might not always fully understand one another. Our intention and desire to undertake more detailed work on translation and language in later stages of the research remain.
As we continue to discuss our approach to cosmology, we would like to pose the following questions to the reader: How do the equivalents of the word “water” in different languages lead us toward different cosmologies? Can we think of water without humans? Can we think of cosmology separately from memory?