The Garden of (Not) Forgetting: Talk with Aslıhan Demirtaş on “Of carrier bags, gardens and boxes”

Dilşad Aladağ and Eda Aslan will be in conversation with Aslıhan Demirtaş (architect and researcher) who wrote the exhibition text, on their exhibition “The Garden of (not) Forgetting”, their journey which began in 2017 with excursions in the garden, as well as on the topics of travelling, gathering and storytelling.

“In gathering, one practices the “arts of noticing”. It involves the noticing of seeds, roots, growth, transformations, decay, cycles, beginnings and ends, differences and diversity. A container, a bag, a vessel is made to hold everything together – entangled, assembled and collected.

The Garden of (not) Forgetting is a carrier bag story. It is a collection of “open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life”. In the particular universe of Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden, Dilşad and Eda have discovered and gathered together multiple geographies, histories, stories, species and hopes.”

As an architect and an artist, in their practice Dilşad Aladağ and Eda Aslan focus on how cities change, the destructiveness of these transformations, and the traces of memory left by them. With The Garden of (not) Forgetting Project, the duo asks in the face of possible destruction: “Is it possible to record a place, to keep its memory alive, to make space for the garden in urban memory?”. The project, which was initially centered around the Istanbul University Institute of Botanics, Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden and the plant-life established here; gained new layers as it extended its focus to the archives, and the stories of the garden’s founders and professors.

This event will be held in Turkish. Please register through this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZwocuutrTstGdcS6tDqRDWHSL2OC…

* The introductory paragraph is an excerpt from the text Aslıhan Demirtaş wrote for the exhibition, titled “Of carrier bags, gardens and boxes”.

Photo credit: Cemil Batur Gökçeer