“Çınaraltı”: Under the plane tree

The lecture performance explores the place of centenarian trees in contemporary urban spaces, delving into the human stories and uses around them and the values and fantasies projected onto them.

In the framework of a research residency in Istanbul in spring 2024, I focused my attention on Plane trees designated as “monuments/monumental” by the Istanbul municipality, taking into account their notable presence in the materiality of the city, as well as in regional folklore and the social imaginary. For the lecture performance, I reconfigure the individual interviews conducted with various local interlocutors during my residency and blend them with audiovisual footage and archival material in an experimental polyphonic reading.

The conversation brings together the voices of an interdisciplinary tree researcher, a cultural manager, a paleobotanist/dendrochronologist, a forest engineer and the artist herself, weaving together multiple perspectives on human-tree entanglements in the city.

Trees are considered as physical entities in their impermanence and mortality, as well as in their potential timefulness beyond their organismal age. They emerge as sites of remembrance and social gathering and as places of refuge. Addressed are the ways they can become instrumentalised in the production of nationalism, the monumentalisation of “nature”, the politics of belonging in the construction and maintenance of landscapes, and the growing risk of tree loss as a result of anthropogenic activity.

In view of the troubling thriving of far-right ideologies across the globe, this project engages with the ecological and political implications of biodiversity and chronodiversity as one continuum through which to acknowledge differences to cultivate communalities.