Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Who Carries the Water

2018; Indiana University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15525864-7025567

1558-9579

Fatma Belkis, İz Öztat,

Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact

Following the Gezi Uprising in 2013, we felt the need to learn from grassroots struggles, ongoing since 1998, against the construction of small hydroelectric power plants (SHPs) on rivers in numerous valleys of Anatolia. The attempt by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to destroy Gezi Park and the occupation that followed made clear the widespread impact of construction-led growth policies in urban and rural contexts. The anti-SHP movement’s slogan is “Rivers will flow free,” which resonated with us as a radical desire for the right to life of all beings. The slogan voices a demand for the agency of rivers and challenges state and corporate decisions to control their courses with pipes, dams, and dredging.The grassroots struggle against SHPs coincides with legislation that allows the leasing of water-use rights in rivers to private energy companies for at least forty-nine years. Following the privatization “the AKP government launched an aggressive programme” whose goal was building “2,000 small (and large) hydropower plants by 2023, the centennial of the Turkish Republic” (Erensu and Karaman 2017, 14). Governments, corporations, and banks frame SHPs as renewable energy production solutions that facilitate “development,” but in Turkey, as in many other places, their implementation involves removing the water from its bed and running it through pipes to feed multiple turbines, which deprives all living creatures in the ecosystem of their life source.Our collaborative installation work Who Carries the Water (Belkıs and Öztat 2015) took form as we visited valleys where residents resist the process of dispossession that ensues with the construction of SHPs. We visited Kastamonu (Loç Valley), Trabzon (Ogene Valley), Artvin (Arhavi Valley), Dersim (Munzur Valley), Tokat (Zile Valley), Muğla (Yuvarlakçay Valley), and Antalya (Ahmetler Village and Alakır Valley). We quickly realized that the struggles extended beyond economic impact and aimed to protect value systems and forms of life that challenge mainstream progress and profit-driven neoliberal agendas. Although there was great local variance based on geography and culture, the water protectors valued cooperative forms of production for subsistence and survival that exist in mutually beneficial relationships with the ecosystem. We tried to shape our own artistic production process to “stand with” the values of these movements. As Kim TallBear (2014, 2) explains, “A researcher who is willing to learn how to ‘stand with’ a community of subjects is willing to be altered, to revise her stakes in the knowledge to be produced.”During our research we found a striking alliance between the “desires” of the human activists and the nonhuman elements in each ecosystem, as indicated by stories, texts, and our observations. We emphasized the vitality and materiality of the nonhuman elements and worked on expressive forms that might better reflect their agency as they are ecologically impacted by human elements. In our interactions with human agents, we came to understand the interconnectivity of beings and elements in these valleys. In the Black Sea region, mountains stand parallel and proximate to the coast, while rivers rift through them, rushing strong and loud. Many told us that Black Sea folk speak loudly because of the noise of the river flow. In another valley, we learned of a trial involving the locals and an SHP company where court-assigned experts came to determine whether the government should designate the site a natural protected area. Our interlocutors told us that as the experts were leaving, two wild goats ambled down the mountain to drink water from the river, leaving the officials no choice but to designate it as such. We learned of many such examples.We adopted a degrowth approach that radically criticizes progress totalitarianism and urges an end to exponential growth. This alternative project for postdevelopment politics suggests a downscaling of both production and consumption. Serge Latouche (2009, 33) outlines the virtuous circles of the eight Rs that trigger degrowth: “re-evaluate, reconceptualize, restructure, redistribute, relocalize, reduce, re-use and recycle.” We used the virtuous circles as a guideline in our project. Realizing the human and nonhuman costs in the production of electricity, we worked with processes and materials that required the least amount of electricity to make and exhibit the work. For example, we used hazelnut sticks as structural and symbolic elements, since they are abundantly available in the Black Sea region: people trim hazelnut plants after every harvest and use them to support bodies and plants and to herd animals (fig. 1).We saw how the struggle itself was transforming social relationships and existing hierarchies, including gendered, within ecosystems. Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva (1993) argue that women farmers primarily protect biodiversity and seeds, facilitating the continuity of life. In Turkey, including the valleys we visited, agricultural production mostly relies on women’s labor. According to 2011 statistics produced by the Turkish Statistical Institute, while paid workers were almost equally represented among men (2,710,000) and women (2,113,000), women comprised 80 percent of unpaid agricultural workers (Çavdar 2015). These numbers reflect how patriarchal exploitation of nature and women’s labor often go together. We were not surprised to meet many women at the forefront of the anti-SHP struggle.The sarı yazma, an everyday yellow kerchief worn by women in the Loç Valley, came to symbolize the struggle beginning in 2010. Historically, the cloth was colored with natural dyes and stamped with woodcut patterns. Nowadays it is mass-produced with silkscreened patterns. We reworked the yellow kerchief in Who Carries the Water using local plants to create natural dyes. We learned the craft of woodcut printing and extended the repertoire of traditional patterns to reflect the dispossession produced by the construction of SHPs by including symbols of the struggle. The Kadın Atmacalar (Woman Hawks), who came together in the Arhavi Nature Protection Platform, identify themselves with the hawk. In Arhavi men traditionally catch and train hawks to hunt smaller birds. By claiming this name, the Woman Hawks positioned themselves on the same plane as the hawk, wearing homemade hawk masks when they attend protest marches. We incorporated the design for the mask in one of the print fabric patterns included in Who Carries the Water. We revisited a traditional peasant woman-figure image and replaced the bird she holds with a hazelnut stick to show how the stick has acquired a new function in the hands of resisting valley women confronting state armed forces and company representatives (Figure 2).Since Who Carries the Water took shape as a conversation between us and agents of struggle in the valleys, we produced a text that put multiple agents into a fictional dialogue with one another, giving voice to human and nonhuman elements (Belkıs and Öztat 2015). Instead of treating the ecosystem as a background, we treated its elements as actual figures with their own voices and actions to express the agency accorded to them in the stories we heard. In this text the chorus of goats provides contextual narrative information, the trees ally with the local population to resist colonizers, and pipes speak on behalf of state and company interests. Human figures express stereotypes of different positions within the struggle based on occupation (psychologist, academician) or ideological position (comrade, feminist) to reflect the negotiations necessary to build intersectionalist politics. We aimed to hear and identify with multiple positions. As the dialogue between the feminist (Itwari) and the student suggests, we tried to invent encounters that enabled us to make connections between local and transnational contexts, activists, and learners. We drew on stories we heard, travelogues, fairy tales, legal documents, news clippings, academic writing, and recorded oral history dirges. By placing these different ways of knowing and expression in dialogue, we aimed to work against hierarchy between them and bring multiple perspectives together to challenge water privatization.We decided not to copyright the outcome of this project, because the work relied heavily on anonymous local knowledge and practices of commoning. Who Carries the Water is in the public domain, allowing the works to be reproduced, modified, and distributed without permission, even for commercial purposes. The text in the installation is copyleft (www.copyleft.org), requiring that distributed and modified versions be openly and freely available. Our position on intellectual property is consistent with criticism of biopatenting practices (Shiva 2012).Drastic changes have taken place in Turkey since we completed the work in 2015. After the July 2016 coup attempt the government declared a state of emergency and has since governed by emergency decrees, suspending the constitutional and legal framework for struggle and artistic production (ArtsEverywhere Report 2017). It is even more urgent to build international solidarity that supports demands for rivers to “flow free” given a context where the right to life and freedom of expression are horrifically violated.