AT LAND AND SEA: TOPOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATION AND THE MOVING IMAGE

May 5-6, 2023 | İstanbul, Turkey

Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University
Location: Santralistanbul

You can check the conference program below or download a one-page version here.
You can download the conference booklet here to check the abstracts.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:​
Gillian Rose (University of Oxford)
Giuliana Bruno (Harvard University)

Conference Program


FRIDAY (May 5)

10.00 WELCOME: Aslı Tunç & Ayça Çiftçi

10.15 KEYNOTE: Gillian Rose (University of Oxford)

Embodying life in digitally-mediated cities: ground and flow in urban animation

11.00 COFFEE BREAK

11.15 PANEL: Beyond Boundaries: Flowing Sounds & Memories, Ecofeminism & Feminist Experiments

Zeynep Toraman, Doğa Cinel, Anna Doyle, Ebru T-Diken & Nilüfer N. Arslan

Moderator: Başak Uçanok Tan

12.30 LUNCH BREAK

13.30 COLLOQUIUM: Waters Eroding Boundaries

Beril Anaç, Berke Derin Yavuzalp, Ceylan Fatma Ceylan, Delal Şahin, Emre Kalaylar, Gizem Hayali, Hilal Şimşek, Hüseyin Buğra Çelik, Irteza Rehman, Katya Arakelyan, Murat Arda Gürsoy, Onur Kocatürk, Özge Akyüz, Pelin Çılgın, Rasimcan Bayram, Selin Umay Özmen, Sertaç Bozkurt, Yiğit Serdar Canoğlu

Moderator: Ebru Thwaites Diken

15.00 COFFEE BREAK

15.30 PANEL * : Fishing, Hydrofeminism, Histories Carried in Water

Mark Fryers, Yo-E Ryou, Bilge Emine Arslan

Moderator: Şirin Erensoy

16.30 COFFEE BREAK

16.45 PANEL * : Photography, Wet Ontology, NFT Poetry

Bryn Tales, Eva Theodoriou, Stephanie Polsky

Moderator: Diğdem Sezen

17.45 COFFEE BREAK

18.00 PANEL * : Liquid Ecology, Urban Memory and Watery Poetics

Pauline Shongov, Su Baloğlu, Kelly Rappleye

Moderator: Nazan Haydari Pakkan

19.00 COFFEE BREAK

19.15 PANEL * : Female Histories: Cartography, Rebirth and Resistance

Santasil Mallik, Tania Ahmadi, Young Joo Lee

Moderator: Nazan Haydari Pakkan

 

 

SATURDAY (May 6)

10.00 KEYNOTE: Giuliana Bruno (Harvard University)

Atmospheres of projection

10.45 COFFEE BREAK

11.00 PANEL: Ocean-Crossing, Aquatic Horror and Oceanic Feeling

Çiçek Üşümezgezer, Ayşegül Kesirli Unur, Oğuz Kayır

Moderator: Ayça Çiftçi

12.00 COFFEE BREAK

12.15 PANEL: Seascape, Cityscape and the Landscape: Imaging & the Gaze

Aleksi Rennes, Esen Kunt, Elif Hant, Bilge Bal 

Moderator: Ayşegül Kesirli Unur

13.30 LUNCH BREAK

14.15 PANEL: Fluidity, Gender and The City

Zehra Derya Koç, Derya Özkan, Zeynep Merve Uygun

Moderator: Ebru Thwaites Diken

15.15 COFFEE BREAK

15.30 PANEL: Return to Seeding Island
Revna Altiok, Berna Çelikkaya, Çağla Demirbaş, Gökçen Erkılıç, Çağla Gillis, Colleen Kennedy-Karpat

Moderator: Colleen Kennedy-Karpat

17.00 PANEL * : Experimental Cinema And Topographical Thinking

Kendra McLaughlin, Elizabeth Brun

Moderator: Beth Tsai

17.45 COFFEE BREAK

18.00 PANEL * : Ocean Of Information, Virtual Reality and Digital Abject

John Kausch, Jason Leo, Szilvia Ruszev

Moderator: Ebru Thwaites Diken

19.00 CLOSING ROUNDTABLE

 

The panels marked with (*) will take place HYBRIDLY.

 

 

May 5 Hybrid Panels - Zoom Session link:
Meeting ID: 840 0914 3864
Passcode: 096960

May 6 Hybrid Panels - Zoom Session link:
Meeting ID: 852 7323 5240
Passcode: 618077

Atölye: Açık Çağrı

İnsandan-ibaret-olmayanlara Dair Filmik Tahayyülü Geliştirme

Proje Geliştirme Atölyesi

Kontenjan: 10 Proje / Kapalı Grup

Yürütücüler: Özlem Güçlü & Ayça Çiftçi

 

Bu atölye, insandan-ibaret-olmayanlara odaklanan geliştirme aşamasındaki projelerin ilerlemesine katkı sağlamayı amaçlamaktadır. Proje sahiplerine, fikirlerini hem meslektaşlarıyla hem de eleştirel insan-sonrası teori ve insandan-ibaret-olmayanların filmik temsili konularında deneyimli yürütücülerle paylaşma, birlikte düşünme, analiz etme ve geliştirme imkânı sağlayacaktır.

Atölye, konferansın gerçekleşeceği 5-6 Mayıs 2023 tarihlerinde öncelikle yüz yüze olarak gerçekleşecektir. Atölye kapsamında, insandan-ibaret-olmayanların gerek konvansiyonel gerekse eleştirel temsiline dair öne çıkan örnekler üzerinden yapılacak seminer dersini  takiben, grup oturumlarında her bir proje sahibi çalışmasını sunacak, tartışacak ve geri bildirim alacaktır. Katılımcılar aldıkları geri bildirim doğrultusunda projeleri üzerine çalışıp, atölyeyi takip eden ayın sonunda çevrimiçi olarak yürütücülerle bire bir görüşme yaparak detaylı öneri ve destek alacaklardır.

Kimler katılımcı olabilir?

Öğrenciler veya ilk ya da ikinci filmini çekmiş/çekecek olan yazar/yönetmenler katılımcı olabilirler. Adaylar proje geliştirme aşamasındaki kısa filmleri, deneme filmleri ya da video projeleriyle başvurabilirler. Proje sahibi tek kişi olabileceği gibi en fazla iki kişiden oluşan bir ekip de olabilir. Atölye ve bire bir görüşme dili Türkçe olacaktır.

Başvuru için neler gerekli?

  1. En fazla 1000 kelimelik proje önerisi (projeye ve gelinen aşamaya dair bilgilerin yanında söz konusu projeyi gerçekleştirmeye dair niyet ve motivasyonun mutlaka açıklandığı; projeye ilham veren eser/sanatçı/kuram/hayvan/insan/bitki/obje vs. neler olduğunun ifade edildiği)
  2. Projeyle ilgili eklemek istediğiniz destekleyici materyaller (görseller, görüntü ya da ses kayıtları vb.)
  3. Proje sahibinin öz geçmişi

* Başvurular ozlem.guclu@msgsu.edu.tr ve ayca.ciftci@bilgi.edu.tr e-posta adreslerine en son 29 Nisan 2023 tarihine kadar gönderilmelidir.

** Kontenjan 10 proje ile sınırlıdır ve başvuru sırasına göre kabul edilecektir. Başvuruların sayısındaki yoğunluğa göre yürütücüler gerektiğinde proje dosyasına göre seçim yapabilirler.

 

Call for Submissions


The concept of border crossing and conquest, or the acquisition of territory, has widely been cast as patriarchal, whereas the ocean’s fluidity, the darkness, and the endless immensity of the sea are often considered ‘dangerously feminine’. The mythological assumptions that operate in many ancient philosophical writings qualify the feminine with formlessness, wetness and darkness, qualities that indicate non-governability, unpredictability and monstrosity, qualities ascribed to the ocean.

Hester Blum suggests that, “in its geophysical, historical, and imaginative properties, the sea […] provides a new epistemology – a new dimension – for thinking about surfaces, depths, and the extra-terrestrial dimensions of planetary resources and relations”. With a special interest in the relationships between the oceanic, the moving image and the feminine, the fifth annual conference of İstanbul Bilgi University, Department of Film and Television, follows the call of ‘oceanic studies’ for a new epistemology that thinks with water and from water so as to explore the possibility of an oceanic flux in films and film studies. After all, moving image arts offers a great potential to think with the waves, currents and tides of water so as to narrate alternative stories. Highlighting this potential, the conference focuses on artistic imaginings of land and sea in moving image arts – film, video, video essay and etcetera, aspiring to seek new topographical vantage points for viewing the internal and the external worlds. We would like to invite contributors to contemplate on artistic and scholarly acts of leaving the static and solid ground of the terrestrial lands and diving into the intangible, unknowable, inhabitable, unpredictable oceans.

Besides traditional academic papers and roundtables, the conference welcomes non-traditional papers and workshop proposals, video essays, films, and videos. Individual paper presentations will be limited to 15 minutes. We will also consider pre-constituted, 30-minute roundtable discussions with 3-5 designated participants. For films, videos and video essays, the conference presentation will consist of up to 10 minutes for screening the work (an excerpt may be selected if the full video essay exceeds this limit), followed by 10 minutes of commentary from the creator.

Please submit an abstract (max 300 words), 3-5 bibliographical sources, 3-5 keywords, and a short CV by February 15, 2023. The selected abstracts for the symposium will be announced by March 5, 2023.

Abstracts selected for presentation will be published online prior to the conference. Full papers selected for publication will be announced after the conference. The conference language is English and no simultaneous translation will be provided.

Contact person: Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan, nilufer.arslan@bilgi.edu.tr

Submission Topics


Possible topics for papers, roundtables, video essays, films and videos include, but are not limited to:

  • Feminist geographies in film and media
  • Fluidity as a cinematic aesthetic
  • Unstructured, unfixed, fluid, instable, mutant narrative forms
  • Ocean, place and space in film
  • Male/female/queer gaze, queering spaces at land and sea
  • Non-human perspectives/gaze/aesthetics in film/media
  • Ecocinema and the more-than-human world
  • Utopian and dystopian portraits of land and sea
  • Global movements, migration routes and transnational interactions across the oceans
  • Seascapes, islands, islanders, beaches and tales of voyage
  • Liminal space of the shorelines and its inhabitants
  • Maritime imagery, maritime communities and spaces in film/media
  • Spatial thinking as transdisciplinary paradigm
  • Reflections on ‘fieldwork’ at land and sea
  • The ‘oceanic archives’

Organizing Committee


Dr. Feride Çiçekoğlu | Istanbul Bilgi University

Dr. Ebru Thwaites Diken | Istanbul Bilgi University

Dr. Ayça Çiftçi | Istanbul Bilgi University

Dr. Ayşegül Kesirli Unur | Istanbul Bilgi University

Dr. Beth Tsai | University of California, Santa Barbara

Dr. Katie Bird | The University of Texas at El Paso

Dr. Gökçen Erkılıç | Harvard University

Dr. Diğdem Sezen | Teesside University

Dr. Şirin Erensoy | Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF

Res. Assist. Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan | Istanbul Bilgi University