~seljblog~

Van Gogh Museum drops Royal Dutch Shell!

Here is a powerful idea whose time has come: FOSSIL FUELS ARE HISTORY.

Yet history only advances piecemeal; some cling to the past to destroy the future, while others come from the future to destroy the present. Fossil fuel companies are doing all they can to stop the passing time. We are a threat to their status-quo, because we come from the future.

Sometimes rock-solid foundations melt away and…

We are at the very early stages of what could become our next great adventure: co-creating sustainable, collective living for ourselves and loved ones. Concretely, we are interested in applying for a tender to develop a self-built, circular social housing —right here, in Amsterdam Oost. Since this is wildly ambitious, we are aware we cannot do it alone: we need your wisdom, inspiration and…

Top Five Climate Porn

Having mentioned in a previous post my favorite short animation about the climate crisis, maybe it is appropriate to propose a complete list of essential feature length documentaries in the same topic. For a documentary junkie like myself, it is quite challenging to keep the list to the strict minimum. But rest assured; here you will not find any slideshow-with-a-Nobel-prize telling you to change…

Everything you wanted to know about the climate crisis (but were afraid to ask an economist)

As the 19th round of intergovernmental climate negotiations are closing in Warsaw with no…

Forgotten Space

Yesterday I presented The Forgotten Space at Kino Praxis. Here is the roughly how I introduced the…

Last week I wrote two brief paper proposals.

The first one is together with Cemre for the Journal of Peer Production, publishing an issue dedicated to Shared Machine Shops:

The first FabLab in Istanbul is being launched within Kadir Has, a private…

AUIW 2013

Last week I attended several sessions of Amsterdam Urban Innovation Week. The topics included coope…

poster presentation

Here is the poster I presented in a conferencerecently. Although it does not follow the order of my…

new blogpost: "background story"

The long weekend opened up with rain, and closed down with rain again. It washed indiscriminately pavements and barricades, helmets and shields, cops and rebels. But the traces of violence will not be washed away so easily from scarred bodies, broken dreams, and innumerable graphic reports documenting the 'point of no return' that the entire chain of command has consciously chose to cross. Their path will be utterly arduous and unsustainable; ours can only widen and rush forward.

In the last weeks, the often-repeated self-evidence has been that "this is not only about the Park". It is about time to replace it permanently with "this is no longer about the Park". The sibling of Tahrir, Syntagma, Zuccotti and others, the physical space of Gezi may be lost, but we have found each other everywhere else. The short-lived beacon of hope will ignite countless others. The joyous promenade is over, now we have a long march ahead of us.

This week was marked by the government's desperate attempts to contain the expansion of people's desires to unexpected heights. On Tuesday morning, a clumsy media spectacle led by a handful of agent provocateurs and the subsequent 20-hour discontinuous terror failed to intimidate the protesters. If anything, the unexpected attack in the evening, transmitted live on international media, must have lifted any remaining doubts about the heavy-handed repression tactics. But make no mistake: while the government is patently bad at crisis management, it effectively seized the opportunity and dismantled the barricades.

The second attempt was to appear to negotiate, while there is not even a hint of a concession. A circus of celebrities and media personalities were convoked on Wednesday to the ruling party HQ to discuss the Park project. Those power worshippers came up with no solution other than a plebiscite. Instead of brokering a deal that would appease some of the protesters, it seems that Erdogan is trying hard to keep its own voter base away from sympathising with the growing movement. Yet, this is still an effective diversion; the fate of the Park (and its occupation) is independent from the widespread unrest across the country, as violence rages in Ankara, lawyers arrested, medics investigated, and media censored.

Here, the streets are electric. Perhaps not entirely in a romantic-revolutionary way, but the walls of separation between 'normal people' have definitely fallen. And I didn't even have to go to the Commune to realise that. While I was still on the plane, the hostess, seeing me taking notes about the situation, vocally interrogated me about how things were perceived abroad, and the steward joined, joyfully cheering "see you at Gezi Park!" The same conversations happen between strangers everywhere, and at each metro stop people clap and shout slogans. Try to imagine, old ladies wearing anti-governement tshirts and chanting "fuck the police".

I arrived to the Gezi Commune on Saturday evening. The park, the square and all the barricaded roads were packed with people. This is nothing like static rally masses, nor like the usual Saturday crowds of Istiklal Avenue. It is a swarming, flowing, wobbling multitude, claiming Gezi (="promenade") in the most literal sense. This is truly a 'movement' —agitated, unshackled, uncontained.

The barricades alone are a political declaration. Construction material and police barriers are repurposed against the construction and the police, the poison itself becomes the remedy. A hollowed out billboard serves as a gateway through one barricade into the liberated zone, or simply "to freedom", suggests the graffiti. The cobblestones are sometimes neatly stacked, and the soft sand of the beach underneath embraces your feet tired of marching on unyielding asphalt and concrete for so long.