Landscape as Archive

In the context of dwelling, the onto-epistemological approach to entanglement can imply material culture as well as the act of living in the spatial world. Archaeologist Ian Hodder has analyzed this entanglement of humans and things in Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic settlement in Anatolia, Turkey, that existed between 7500 BCE and 5700 BCE. Hodder sees the settlement as an “open system” that entangles clay-made dwellings with social and material systems. To examine the resilient parts of entanglement, Hodder looks at the material processes of human labor within these dwellings, asserting that if “things go wrong in an entanglement, and as change occurs, it is these focal nodes that are likely to be the most resilient.” It is interesting to see the connective tissue around the formation of matter and entanglement between Hodder, the archaeologist, and philosopher/physician Barad.  The notion of resilience is crucial in Barad’s notion of entanglement too; Barad labels it as “an affirmative critical tool attending to the constructive and/as relational ontology.” Taking up Barad’s claim that entanglement “entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future,” I understand it as the ethical aspect of entanglement, an aesthetic means of differentiating it from “assemblage.” This difference frames entanglement as affecting related entangled existences and their conditions, while assemblage refers to a visual epistemology in which fragments and layers are orchestrated on the surface.

Hodder explains: “The distinctive aspect of entanglement derives from the attention given to the term ‘depend’ in the relationships between things and between humans and things.” Dependency, however, entails ethical grounds. Barad’s “intra-action” is a slightly different term that does not refer to interaction or dependency, but I think it still shares parallel frames with Hodder. For Barad, materialization is at once a process, a relation of production, and a reconfiguration of the material-social relations of the world. Intra-action, by contrast, suggests that actors do not pre-exist the relations through which they emerge. Actors come into being within the relation itself. In other words, actors are differentiated from one another only through their relational entanglements; they do not exist independently as separate, individual entities. Materialization is therefore a process, a relation of production: a reconfiguration of the world’s material and social relations.

The Horizon of the Apocalypse

It is a hot summer day in 2025. In Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, I listen to the archivists at the ICARDA seed archive as they describe how they preserve different varieties of grain and ensure their resilient survival. Seed archives and discursive initiatives such as ICARDA or Buzuruna in Lebanon, and the Heirloom Seed Library in Palestine, seek to preserve the seed as a more-than-human entity within geographies of violence, while strengthening its discursivity and agency. This effort can also be understood as a form of vital resilience within the present temporality of a catastrophe yet to come.  How do more-than-human entangled existences bear witness to catastrophes through writing, images, and narratives? What kinds of paths do the enduring expansions of threshold spaces produced by regimes of catastrophe offer us across the past, present, and future, and what kinds of traces do they hold? How are witnesses’ relationships to space, geography, and land constituted? How are sensibility and imagery reconstituted in the aftermath of catastrophe?

In The Arab Apocalypse, poet and artist Etel Adnan speaks words that evoke a fractured narrative—or the memory of cycles—beneath the sun rising in the East and amid the overlapping shadows of catastrophes.[14] Thinker Jalal Toufic, in turn, describes this as an effort in which the culture and tradition through which the artist thinks and represents are withdrawn, suspended, and surpassed under the effects of catastrophes and disasters.[15] What Donna Haraway calls “staying with the trouble” means registering catastrophe not as a story of loss with the human at its center, but as a condition sustained together by the human and the more-than-human.[16] This absence of the human is not a lack, but a chosen position. A seemingly naïve and empty terrain or landscape may render past violence and catastrophe as though they were invisible. In the writings of Sema Aslan, too, fiction and space emerge as a threshold narrative of witnessing, constituted through testimony to a human agency that cannot be fully described or substantiated.[17]

Artistic practice can reanimate imaginaries of the future, apocalyptic narratives, and thresholds under the horizon of ecological and colonial apocalypses. As is the case in many parts of Anatolia today, we look for forms of resistance, knowledges of solidarity, and methods developed by displaced, dispossessed, and precarious human and living communities within the local phenomenologies of the Tigris basin. By local phenomenologies, I mean cosmologies in which no single subject is placed at the centre, and which encompass entangled forms of knowledge and experiences of being shared by humans and more-than-humans. In her work, researcher Macarena Gómez-Barris discusses the phenomenology of local communities, which differs from Western-centred more-than-human discourses, in the context of decolonisation and as a response to epistemic violence. The phenomenology of these local communities, as she describes it, extends beyond the individual biological body toward the earthly body of mountains, rivers, stones, and the lands on which people live. I adopt this approach in order to understand intertwined and entangled ways of knowing, as well as the layers of memory that are being systematically erased. Accordingly, the effects of war and the renegotiation of regional borders require us to rethink how we approach spatial infrastructures and how we work with them. This situation should be considered not only as a threshold at the regional scale, but also as part of the capitalism-centred militarist mechanism that we call the geontologies of landscape and land. As we live through the catastrophe of the future in the present, communities forcibly displaced and exiled from the apocalyptic landscapes of the present and the landscapes to come, and from spaces operating at different scales, will form alliances as exiles entangled with seeds, plants, animals, and all forms of life, as well as with their narratives. The assemblages formed through all these forms of resilience and vulnerability contain an organic and inorganic vitality in which different ecological cosmologies come into relation with one another.

Inspired by the Epic of Gilgamesh, a major historical epic of the Mesopotamian region, the medium-length film Gilgamesh: She, Who Saw the Deep[18], which I made with artist Anton Vidokle in 2022, interrogates catastrophe and the posthuman through myth and the shared ground between the human and the more-than-human, much like our 2013 short film The Fall of Artists’ Republic / Sanatçı Cumhuriyetinin Düşüşü. The watersides of Batman, Mardin, and Hasankeyf; hidden small valleys; Êzdî villages; sacred sites known as Ziyaret; caves submerged beneath earth and water as a result of the Ilısu Dam; construction sites; and pastures that, at the time of filming, had not yet been fenced off by extractivist companies—all became witnesses to our Gilgamesh film.

In my work, grounded in experimental film practice, I draw on different modes of knowing—from imaginary narratives and poetic discourse to land, pasture, and landscape—as an accumulative way of thinking. This possibility opens up space at thresholds for witnessing that which cannot be seen. I was interested in archives of landscapes across the Tigris River basin, pre-architectural structures, and—as I mentioned earlier—the relationships women establish with more-than-human worlds. I drew inspiration from Zainab Bahrani and Marc Van De Mieroop’s books on Mesopotamia, as well as from David Wengrow’s research. These readings helped me understand not only the history of settlement in Mesopotamia, but also the fragmented, non-linear timelines of humans and more-than-human beings.

Perhaps we might describe Enkidu as the first ecologist, as he attempts to save the Cedar Forest when Gilgamesh seeks to destroy it. I find it particularly compelling to consider how the epic’s stories resonate with the effects of climate change in the region where I live, displacement caused by dams, catastrophes produced through the erasure of memory, and processes of aggressive urbanization.

The Sumerian king Gilgamesh became renowned as the founder of Uruk, particularly through the architectural representations of his power. The Epic of Gilgamesh conveys the transformative effects that environmental catastrophes—in this case, floods and droughts across Mesopotamian landscapes—have always exerted. Read from an ecological perspective, Gilgamesh emerges as a symbol of ancient urbanization and a figure representing the sovereign power of modernizing forces. Colonization and landscape standardization have always depended on controlling agricultural production and erasing localities.

Fertility, ecology, and seasonal transformations have long been connected to agricultural cycles, as expressed in myths in which women appear as central protagonists. These traditions, which originated in the ancient world, remain of central significance today, particularly among communities along the banks of the Tigris River. If we follow the work of anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, the transition of early human civilizations to sedentary life cannot be understood as a linear story in which hunter-gatherers simply evolved into vertical and hierarchical agricultural societies. As Graeber and Wengrow argue, tracing non-linear narratives also challenges patriarchal genealogies. The “Mesopotamian fertility rituals” associated with Dumuzi/Tammuz, for example—the shepherd-god and personification of vegetal life whose death was mourned each summer—reveal the origins of significant female cults.[19]

Today’s climate crisis and the extractive practices that underpin it reactivate in our memory the ecological catastrophes and anthropogenic extinction events depicted in ancient texts.

Artistic Methodology and Resilience

How, then, within this conceptual framework—in which I take the Tigris River and its basin as a point of departure and as a companion—can we confront catastrophe and crisis in solidarity, within a reality in which the earth is engaged in intra-action with entangled layers operating at different scales?

In Radiation and Revolution, writer Sabu Kohso considers ruin, destruction, and capitalism together through the context of the Fukushima disaster. He identifies the Fukushima nuclear disaster as the singular name for the corruption, decay, and degeneration operating through the layers of the state under contemporary capitalism. Kohso also emphasizes the significance of alternative networks of solidarity woven in the aftermath of catastrophe and identifies three principles of action: protecting life, militantly confronting conflict, and connecting the two through autonomy: “If there is some hope for the future of disasters and crises, it lies in the possibility that these three initiatives can be particularly developed and mutually reinforced in confronting apocalyptic situations.”[20]

Kohso elaborates these three initiatives as follows: first, protecting life in a form that encompasses all horizontal elements through decentralized organization; second, resisting by confronting conflict with determination; and third, producing the methods of such resistance while linking these two forms of action and rendering them autonomous.

Although the scale of the Tigris’s climatic and infrastructural catastrophes across deep time extends throughout the region and across borders into other countries—Iraq, Syria, and beyond—and although it offers us diverse forms of local knowledge and layered ecological cosmologies, it also reminds us of forms of resilience and resistance. In this context, spatial scale is not merely a physical component of design and architecture; it is also a question of how scale is understood within social and political contexts.

The artist’s engagement in the field, within a region, in contested territories, landscapes, or other forms of spatiality requires, through an ethno-phenomenological method, a material and embodied attachment situated along the delicate line of onto-epistemology. Within this context, the artist acts as a mediator, a shaman, and a reactivator, unsettling the established relations that colonialism has produced with more-than-human worlds. In this sense, we witness the agential intra-action of phenomena that constitute the world’s reality; the artist, in turn, relates to this reality primarily through more-than-human elements and territories.

I am thinking through the planetary conditions that a phenomenological approach might invite us to understand through the inseparability of human and non-human—or more-than-human—worlds, rather than approaching humans and matter, or subjectivities and territories, through oppositional distinctions. Such an approach might offer a methodological tool for understanding more-than-human elements as sites of resilient agency capable of generating different ontological roots.

A crucial question within such artistic practices is this: while bringing local knowledge to the surface, forging kinship with more-than-human elements, and developing an intersectional artistic methodology, how can we prevent artistic experience from becoming enclosed within itself? How can we transform this experience into shared vulnerability and the formation of willful alliances? Without falling into the fetishization of land or territory, and without becoming trapped in an essentialist notion of the local, how can artists construct an effective social and visual representation in conjunction with practices of resistance?

Each everyday practice is, in part, a form of resistance to the forced transformation of the earth and, in part, a way to coexist with and survive through the earth. I understand layered landscapes, lands, gardens, and pastures as interwoven archives that transmit hidden narratives and the earth’s memory.

* Some parts of this text have appeared under the title “Landscape as Archive: Tigris Phenomenologies” in Bundle of Reeds: Art and Cosmotechnics in the Wake of The Tigris, edited by Rana Issa and Mike Sperlinger, published by OCA in collaboration with Archive Books, November 2026, and under the title “The Entanglement Ontology of Architecture: Territorial Materiality without Matter” in the book Swamps and the New Imagination: On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture and Philosophy, edited by Nomeda Urbonas, Gediminas Urbonas, and Kristupas Sabolius (2020).