Events

At a time when climate vulnerability and environmental disasters are so prominent this seminar/workshop will introduce us to fields of sensory design that help us listen to audible warnings and to the universe of sound that surrounds, nourishes, affects and guides us, while increasing our awareness.

Participants will encounter new and different forms such as “soundscape, sound installation, environmental sounds and sound sculpture,” and explore basic methods of recording, selecting and combining sounds around them. Using their ideas and simple recording and editing tools, they will try to design and produce a small sound work. This might become a “soundscape,” an “audio documentary,” or a kind of “aural cinema.”

The aim is to enrich our approach and perspective on the sound identities and cultures around us, and to gain and foster deeper inner awareness through sensory channels.

The exhibition can be visited throughout the festival. Meet the artist: 8 October 2026, 17:30, Itırlı Bahçe.

Does the story of a material really end when its original purpose has been fulfilled? The exhibition returns to what remains from artistic production processes with this question in mind.

In the words of artist Selçuk Gürışık: “The works presented in this exhibition were created by selecting anew and transforming fabrics, fibres and various surfaces left over from artistic production processes, allowing them to acquire renewed value through design. In a world of diminishing resources, material is approached not as residue whose useful life has ended, but as a creative possibility—one that can open onto new ideas, forms and lives. The added value generated through design and art reveals the overlooked potential of materials and opens the way towards new fields of production. This selection was prepared to meet BIFED’s commitment to making environmental memory visible, and to share the continuing story of material."

Following the screening of Dockworkers.

Ecological justice cannot be considered separately from the conditions of labour. The systems of production that pollute the air, water, and soil also leave their mark on the bodies and lives of the people who work within them.

Neslihan Acar, president of DGD-SEN (Warehouse, Port, Shipyard and Maritime Workers’ Union), has been involved in organising and resistance movements by warehouse, port, and shipyard workers in recent years. In this event, she will discuss the working conditions of shipbreaking workers and pollution in Dilovası through the lives and experiences of workers themselves.

The event aims to look, from the perspective of workers, at where the right to work, workers’ health, and the demand for a liveable world intersect.

She played an active role in the founding of DGD-SEN, which represents workers particularly in warehouses, as well as ports and shipyards. After serving as General Organising Secretary, she was elected president in August 2021. She continues to organise within the union and advocate for workers’ rights both on the ground and through media platforms.

The land is the foundation that enables nature’s transformation. Under power, however, it becomes property, and domination gives rise to class divisions. Yet land itself is classless, directly linked to geography, climate and ecology. Culture and society are historical, dialectical parts of this relationship, but within systems of property and domination, their apparent unity is fragmented. On a global scale of exploitation, this fragmentation deepens, dividing the world into distorted categories of North, South, East and West.

In the Collective Film Reading Workshop, we will discuss how Desierto Verde reveals this fragmentation through the voice of Chile, a desert that appears green, and dead ends that resemble cycles. We will question life and death not within the vicious circle of capitalism, but within the cycle of life itself.

By now we know: the ecological destruction caused by a thermal power plant means felled trees, polluted air, diminishing water, and impoverished soil. But what kind of traces does the ecological struggle leave on the social life of the village where that power plant is slated to be built? Solidarity, neighborliness, collective production, the bond formed with home... How does resisting together transform all of these?

In 2014, the resistance against felling 6,600 olive trees for a planned thermal power plant in Soma’s Yırca Village became one of the iconic acts of resistance in Türkiye's environmental movement. Afterward, the women of Yırca transformed the resistance into collective production under the umbrella of Yırca Hanımeli. The book Mukufluk* pursues the less visible traces of this struggle. Twelve years later, Yırca reunites with BIFED to reflect on memory, collective labor, and the life built together since that day.

*mukuf: (in local Aegean and Mediterranean dialects) one who is knowledgeable, aware, observing, witnessing.

The Women of Yırca As our catalog went to print, since the guests attending from Yırca had not yet been confirmed, we could not include their individual names.

The date and time will be announced on our social media channels.

We planned this walk to explore the limits of our sensory ecology. We aim to gain sensory awareness about ourselves and the environment we live in. We will decide our route according to the number of participants and the weather conditions. The walk will be held in all weather conditions and a suitable route will be determined. We expect you to wear comfortable and safe shoes and protective clothing suitable for the weather conditions. The walking time is 40 minutes. Afterward, there will be a 20-minute question-and-answer session. Total time will be 60 minutes.

Dates and times for the separate Turkish and English tours will be announced on our social media channels.

Named after the legendary King Tenes, the island lies at the entrance to the Dardanelles and has been a crossroads of sea routes, trade, and different civilizations for thousands of years. In antiquity, it was an independent and prosperous city-state, wealthy enough to mint its own silver coins. It was known for its wine and agricultural abundance, and appears in Homer’s epics as one of the places connected to the story that changed the course of the Trojan War.

How do people on an island use the land and the sea? What do they grow, produce, and consume? What kind of relationship do they build with other living beings? Archaeology and ecology ask the same questions from different points in time. As we reflect on ecology at BIFED, learning about the memory of the place where we gather is also part of that reflection.

On this walk, guided by Prof. Dr. Turan Takaoğlu, who has led the excavations at Bozcaada Castle for the past six years, we will look at traces left behind from different periods of the island’s history.