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Water moves through bodies, soils, buildings, and seas, connecting environments that are often understood and governed separately. Following water brings histories of extraction and ecological damage into relation with questions of who controls its movements, who has access to it, and whose ways of life are disrupted. These struggles also concern ways of inhabiting and understanding a place: the knowledge carried through everyday practices, the memories attached to disappearing waters, and the rituals through which relationships are sustained.
How, then, does water—as a material force linking the local to the global, the human to the more-than-human—compel us to question boundaries across geographies and between disciplines? What might water reveal about resilience, adaptation, and relationality, both as a repository of past struggles and as a reservoir of potential futures? Whose knowledge shapes how water is understood and governed, and how different ways of knowing might inform more reciprocal relationships with water and other forms of life?
“Water Assemblies” takes up these questions as part of Forum, Salt’s research initiative that brings spatial practices into conversation with different fields of knowledge. Its inaugural edition brings together five research groups to explore water’s relationships with bodies, geographies, infrastructures, language, and imagination.
“Water Assemblies” began in March 2025 with a three-week public program that transformed Salt Beyoğlu’s ground floor into a shared research office. Workshops, talks, screenings, reading sessions, and performances brought the five research groups together, creating a space for encounter, discussion, and collective inquiry. The work continued through collective reading, mapping, listening, archival investigation, and fieldwork, with each group developing its own questions and methods.
Wetlands as Pedagogical Spaces, led by Merve Anıl, examines wetlands as ecological, social, and political formations, bringing critical wetland scholarship into dialogue with local contexts through collective reading and discussion. Its interconnected glossary gathers different ways of understanding wetlands and the relationships that shape them.
Wetness, led by Merve Bedir and Duygu Cihanger Ribeiro, develops a water cosmology through fieldwork, explorations of language, and collective embroidery. Research in Istanbul and Ankara connects water infrastructures and everyday experience with bodily and sensory ways of knowing.
Sea Snotting or Nothing Less than Flamboyant in the Salty Waters of Istanbul, led by Aslıhan Demirtaş, takes the emergence of sea snot in the Sea of Marmara as a starting point for exploring relationships of care and reciprocity with water. Performative encounters, expeditions, wayfaring, and anecdote-making cultivate correspondences among participants, coastal communities, and other forms of life.
Istanbul Coastline Atlas Vol. X: Deep Listening/Deep Mapping, led by Gökçen Erkılıç, extends an ongoing investigation of Istanbul’s changing coastlines through participatory mapping and deep listening. Archival materials, personal accounts, and underwater sound recordings contribute to an evolving atlas of the city’s relationships with water.
Speculative Fictions, led by Ezgi Hamzaçebi, uses writing and shared making to explore water’s relationships with memory, displacement, ancient practices, and other possible worlds. Thirteen individual texts enter into conversation with collectively developed objects and an experimental video.
The website brings these research processes into wider circulation through glossaries, maps, texts, sound recordings, and visual materials. It offers points of entry into the groups’ questions and methods, alongside resources for further reading, discussion, and research. New materials will be added as the project continues into its next stage in 2027.
“Water Assemblies” is programmed by Merve Yücel together with Eylül Şenses from Salt.
Click here to explore the website.
