Eda's Project Statement: Making Kin is a speculative art proposal that envisions a community deeply committed to conserving endangered species. This community takes the role of nurturing and restoring endangered nature as their kin. The idea is inspired by Noah's Ark and Donna Haraway, "Make kin, not babies." The project begins in a town of a village in Mersin, Turkey, consisting individuals roughly about 150 people of diverse identities and genders. Their goal in this town was to restore the lands and the biodiversity of the earth. The movement spread through parts of Europe, Asia, America and the other continents. Their community rarely make human babies, but all are committed to reversing the climate apocalypse. For them: kin is made through care. Care is not just about humans but the earth and all the living. In this community, families are not made of blood, genes or heterosexuality inclusing humans and non-humans. Kinship is not rooted in patriarchy. Each individual who lives in this town strives to restore biodiversity under the threat of global warming. The movement continued in New York City when members of the community starting to get pregnant with an artifical womb to long-eared bats. The climate change-related global warming and the drying lakes and puddles threaten these species, making it very hard for them to live because there is a temperature that they are used to. Drawing inspiration from the urgency of protecting endangered animals, one of the results of the climate crisis and the potential of scientific advancements, the project explores the concept of artificial pregnancy as a means to restore dwindling populations and kinship between species.
Eda's Artist Statement: In my research based and interdisciplinary art practice I use speculative fabulation to envision possible alternate futures and reexamine our past and present mythologies.
I use the intimacy and immediacy of performance, develop sculptures experimenting with different materials, create videos and installations.
My work draws on the experience of existing between fixed categories. Working on rigid archetypes of the Turkish culture, I create disruptions to illuminate the expectations and rules of binaries.
I grew up in a traditionally patriarchal household and found out about feminism at a very young age-wanting and needing equality. Since then my resistance has taken shape in my artistic practice making visible queer-feminist contemporary art practices in and out from Turkey.
In my artworks I like repetition. In the past this repetition took forms of sculptural objects, words or sentences.