Tower House, 226 Cromwell Road
Sat 26 Sept · 16:00 · Free
BOOK LAUNCH 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. RSVP
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.