Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan
26 September 2026, 4pm
What is the relationship between extractivism and visuality? What can reflecting on this relationship tell us about the politics of extractivism especially in colonial contexts whose coloniality has remained underrecognised?
Join us for a special launch event as we explore these questions in light of geographer Eray Çaylı's new book Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan (University of Texas Press, 2025). Derived from Çaylı’s years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. In the book, together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows how images challenge extractivism.
Architect and architecture scholar Nishat Awan, sociologist Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız and anthropologist and geographer Austin Zeiderman will be in conversation with the author. Moderated by curator Siegrun Bahar Salmanian.
The conversation will span topics ranging from the transformation of land and water to the politics of memory and place, and from regimes of visibility to local and embodied forms of knowledge. It invites participants to think of the sites where extractivism operates not simply as physical terrain or spaces of victimhood but instead as sites of vibrant social and political arenas where struggles, narratives and imagination intersect.
Image: Book Cover with a watercolour from the series In the Rivers of the North of the Future (2014–2017) by İz Öztat © İz Öztat. Courtesy of the artist and Zilberman, Istanbul / Berlin / Miami.
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SPEAKERS
Nishat Naz Awan is Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture at UCL. Situated between art and architectural practice, her research explores the intersection of geopolitics and space, with a particular focus on diasporas, migration and border regimes, as well as modes of spatial representation and alternative forms of architectural production.
Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız is Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the MA in Human Rights, Culture, and Social Justice. Her research focuses on truth-telling and subjectivity in the aftermath of mass violence, drawing on extensive experience in working with local and international human rights organisations.
Austin Zeiderman is Professor of Geography at LSE. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who specializes in the social and political dimensions of urbanization and the environment in Latin America and the Caribbean, drawing on ethnography to examine race, infrastructure, security, and environmental change.
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