Practice Matters: Engaging Communities
Practice Matters is a project inquiring, highlighting and discussing design, craft, architecture, spatial and urban practice, and their ability to act in relation to present urgent issues of crisis and conflicts.
This public event, taking place on the occasion of the Istanbul Biennale 2025, brings together practitioners to discuss how to organise rural and urban communities in response to shared social and environmental challenges.
Participants include Volkan Büyükgüngör, Evrim Çoksöyler, Emre Rona, Maria Richter Simsek and Bediz Yılmaz. Introduction and moderation by Magnus Ericson and Eylül Şenses.
This gathering focuses on practices that in different ways engage in issues of land use and ecology, agriculture and food production, in a time of late capitalist modernity. It aims to reflect on often-overlooked aspects of collective work, including negotiating differences between diverse constituencies, navigating conflicts, and establishing shared ground. It will highlight examples of practice and discuss how to organise, adapt and evolve participatory approaches when working with diverse communities and perspectives. Participants share their strategies for extending engagement, experimenting with inclusive methods and developing new forms of collaboration. Discussions will also address the relationship between urban and rural contexts, considering how different practices can engage with and learn from one another sharing knowledge and experience.
Planner and researcher Evrim Çoksöyler, and Holistic Management trainer and field expert Volkan Büyükgüngör discuss their work on various projects for Anatolian Grasslands, a social enterprise dedicated to strengthening climate change mitigation and adaptation processes by creating regenerative systems. Landscape designer and permaculture practitioner Emre Rona shares his experience working on environmental problems and community engagement in the Aegean coast town of Datça. Here reversed migration creates new social dynamics, with benefits, but also conflicts between locals and newcomers. Designer Maria Richter Simsek is working with social and environmental change and rural development in Sweden. She is designing processes, structures and new traditions that support small rural communities to drive long-term development together. She investigates how to build infrastructure for local participation and create space to unlearn current dominating practices of care for nature. Researcher and agriculture practitioner Bediz Yılmaz shares her experience from working with one of Istanbul’s historic bostans and the small, diverse community that works to ensure the survival of these gardens and their efforts ranging from negotiating with the municipality and documenting archaeological heritage to raising public awareness and creating market spaces for its produce through a food community.
Practice Matters: Engaging Communities is organised as a collaboration between IASPIS and Salt, on the occasion of the Istanbul Biennale 2025. The programme is curated by Magnus Ericson and Eylül Şenses.
Participants
Volkan Büyükgüngör is the co-founder of Anatolian Grasslands, an internationally accredited trainer and field professional with the Savory Institute. He is also the co-founder and a former resident of the Ormanevi Collective. Between 2014 and 2019 he managed the Anatolian Grasslands’ application site, overseeing a pasture-based cattle and sheep enterprise on more than 200 acres of land, and mentoring paid interns during their apprenticeships. At Anatolian Grasslands, he provides training, consultancy services, and coordinates large-scale, multi-partner, and multi-stakeholder steppe restoration projects.
Evrim Çoksöyler is a planner and researcher based in Izmir, Türkiye. Through her work in civil society organizations in various roles and as a freelance researcher she now focuses on ecology and regenerative agriculture. She has been trained in permaculture design, composting, soil microbiology and Holistic Management. She mainly works with Anadolu Meraları (Anatolian Grasslands, Savory Institute’s hub in Türkiye) where she got her training in Holistic Management. Then she was trained by the Savory Institute in 2021 to become an EOV (Ecological Outcome Verification) monitor, and has been working as one, on project basis, ever since. Learning the language that land speaks through ecosystem process indicators, she observes grasslands, reports what it tells which informs the actions for regeneration.
Emre Rona is a landscape designer and permaculture practitioner based in Datça, Türkiye. Since 2010 he carries on theoretical and applied permaculture related work, where he teaches, advises and builds simple yet efficient nature-based techniques and approaches on creating holistic landscapes, focusing on rainwater harvesting, wastewater reuse, erosion control, organic waste management and food production. He has been consulting various NGOs in their projects and is a member of various working groups operating under the City Council of Datça municipality, a volunteer group of people trying to find ways of helping the local authorities with knowledge, expertise and work force.
Maria Richter Simsek is a designer based in the south of Sweden, working within the field of rural development and social and environmental change. She is interested in how social design and visualization can support community development and the power of collaborative learning when mobilizing for change. Her work is practically rooted in process design, graphic facilitation and participatory design and experience from leading projects such as Lärande Bygd (Learning Village), Permapilot, Aktiva byar (Active Villages). Her focus right now is on the conditions of the rural forests and the social norms and practices of care that shapes them and our relationships.
Bediz Yılmaz is a researcher, and agriculture practitioner based in Istanbul, Türkiye. She has a background in Public Administration, Political Science, and Urban Studies with a PhD on forced migration and social exclusion in a slum neighbourhood of Istanbul. Following her dismissal after signing the declaration of Academics for Peace, she shifted her focus to ecology and agriculture. She is currently involved in urban agriculture at the historical Piyalepaşa Orchard in Istanbul, serves as advisor to different NGOs, moderates the Fair Food Community initiated by Postane, and is one of two instructors for the Ecological Life Guide for New Urbanites training program.
Eylül Şenses is a curator and programmer at Salt Research and Programs, Istanbul. Her curatorial practice focuses on urban and rural commons, spatial and environmental justice with a particular emphasis on socially and politically engaged practices. She is one of the founding members of the Urban Studies Cooperative (Urban.koop), a collective network of urbanists, artists, and creatives who are willing to co-develop urban policies, programs, and projects for the local communities. Additionally, she is a co-founder of ANATOPIA, an emerging cooperative that embraces the extended geography we inhabit as a deep time and expansive ground, aiming to reestablish the narrative with hope. Together with Magnus Ericson, she is the curator of Practice Matters.
Magnus Ericson is Head of IASPIS Applied Arts, leading the program related to design, crafts, architecture, spatial and urban practice. He is a Stockholm-based curator and educator working across design, architecture, urbanism, and art. Over the years he has, in different institutional settings and as an independent curator, combined curatorial and pedagogical practice with an emphasis on socially engaged critical practice, alternative pedagogies and organising spaces for learning. He is the founder and co-curator of the IASPIS project Urgent Pedagogies and together with Eylül Şenses, the curator of Practice Matters.
Practice Matters is an IASPIS project and platform for inquiring, highlighting and discussing design, architecture, spatial and urban practice and its ability to act in relation to present urgent issues of crisis and conflicts. It aims to respond to an urgent need to discuss how artistic practices may organise and act in response to global challenges – from climate change and ecological collapses, geopolitical and economic crisis and displacement of people to issues of democracy, social justice and equality. The project engages with practices acting between and across artistic and civic society practice, social movements and activism, research and pedagogies, and explores the role of cultural and educational institutions and organisations. Practice Matters unfolds through meetings, public events and publishing. In bringing together a plurality of practices, fields of knowledge and experiences, the project aims to serve as a common space and resource to discuss, think together, (un-)learn and re-think the role and possibilities of design, architecture, spatial and urban practice today.