GELDİKÇE BAHAR, As the Spring Arrives, Water Recalls the Nomads

It has a certain connection to Ulla Johansen’s archive, in which she documents her research in 1956 and 1957 with Aydınlı Nomadic Pastoralists in Çukurova. But before that, other archival materials have been accumulating as part of my broader focus on Çukurova (Cilicia) since 2022. That year, I initiated the Mahsul (Yield) Project, a platform that assembles narratives from this region, moving beyond the glorification of the agricultural industry. Ulla’s archive, together with Yaşar Kemal’s novel The Legend of the Thousand Bulls (1971), was part of it. The two, witnessing the struggle of Turcoman pastoralists, made me remember the traces I carry yet have no memory of. Also, Johansen’s archive took me on a route that was vital for reimagining the geography I grew up in with different rhythms and relations. I started my doctoral research to look at the present struggle of nomadic rhythms among pastoralists and in the region’s water bodies, which the film is part of.  While searching for a narrative that can capture different temporalities of this struggle, listen to its geography and witness the present, I started filming during my field visits. Revisiting these records became part of my working routines as a researcher living between countries and travelling through artist residencies.

I grew up in this region, between the city centre and the mountain villages of my grandparents. After I moved to İstanbul in 2011, I came back for my first long visit in 2019 when I lost my grandma. Back then, we had a day trip with my uncle and auntie to revisit parts of her family’s seasonal route from lowland to highland villages. We stopped at springs, fountains, where they were camping. Most of them were almost dried up. This was the first time I recognised how disconnected I was from this movement, from pastoralism as well. What was left to my generation was the final destination, a highland village, a summer town filled with concrete houses. Well, I moved to Germany in 2019, too and started thinking more about belonging to a place and an identity, which was questionable for me in the case of Turkey, too. Finding Johansen’s archive and reading Kemal’s novel reminded me of the question of how settling in one place can create a displacement from movement and from joint rhythms with flocks and water. The film and my research journey arise from this question. I am interested in understanding this displacement in Anatolia as part of Turkey’s modernisation, among other displacements and in relation to them.

Walking with is the core of shepherding: Walking with goats, walking along the water sources and between mountains and plains… When I first met with shepherds in 2024, I had to walk to talk as the goats moved constantly. This was a moment I realised that pastoralists recall memories along the way. Each tree, stone, flower, and bird has some place in the shepherd’s mind. And so, walking became the core of my way of listening to shepherds, joining their rhythm, which tunes with the goat’s rhythm. Walking and learning, I became an apprentice in my research field, which helped me to shift the conventional hierarchy in interviewing. The shepherds whom I learn from lead my listening experience. While recording this, my only filming decision was to be in front of the camera as one of the subjects. Being honest with my lack of knowledge, confusion, but also curiosity and excitement. 

Following the shepherds and leaving control brings space for spontaneous encounters. This was captured in the film. Neither our day nor who will join the walk was planned. The day was possible with our host shepherd, Mahmut Alasırt’s interest in my curiosity and his generous hospitality and passion for movement. Young shepherd İbrahim, also a fellow researcher, took us to this valley. His uncle, Kadir, a former nomadic pastoralist, joined us to visit the shepherding routes that he had longed to visit. Kadir’s daughter, Neva, joined us at the last minute to search for fossils and stones on the mountain peaks. Everyone gathered when Uncle Mahmut invited us to forage for tea. It was one of the miraculous days; happily, we had the chance to film.

Editing started by noticing threads, connections and contradictions in conversations. I first conceived the structure of this film while we were at the Bergmann Estate Residency with Burak Çevik. As well as being a producer and a partner, he supported the process in various ways. Back then, we were talking a lot about finding a structure on the editing table - after a long period of filming without a real structure, but with ambiguous ideas. Like this, my filming process resembled foraging, and the editing process resembled a lot of weaving connections and exploring a structure. 

At first, I was focused on editing our walking sequences. Our conversation in the present landscape passes through different layers of time that have shaped this geography. In a sense, our walk itself was “interrupted” by ghosts such as lost species of goats and trees, dried-up cisterns and tamed rivers, and forgotten fermentation methods or certain modernist ideals that once led many to believe in industrial development. While editing and listening to our conversations, I wanted to bring up these threads, and archival footage was woven into the walking sequences.

As it is similar for various geographies, most of the early modernist infrastructure was built to reclaim the unruly landscapes and communities of Anatolia and put them to labour for the nation’s growth. While nomadic pastoralists in Çukurova were encouraged to settle and cultivate since the late Ottoman Empire, developing water infrastructures was more characteristic of 20th-century Turkey. Both films carry traces of this history. Although they have very different aesthetics and ideological approaches- Kıral’s film is a social realist fiction narrative while the other one is state propaganda- they have something in common: The water dams appear as salvation infrastructures for the flooded, muddy landscape of the delta plain in both films. 

I question this common role a lot. Every time I watch the state film, I am fascinated by the way people celebrate the opening of a gigantic dam like they won a battle. Kıral’s film shows an idealist bureaucrat advocating for the peasants’ well-being during a malaria epidemic by constructing a dam. Our contemporary relation to water is quite complicated, and taming is still the most common way to relate to ‘unruly’ water bodies. Especially in places like the Çukurova delta, where water ecologies have been destroyed by and for water infrastructures. There were other forms of symbiosis with water for centuries before the 20th century, before modernity initiated a battle with water in which dams represent a victory. I am interested in remembering these symbiosis, negotiating with water bodies instead of taming them. To remember, it is also important to realise how we forget. These two archival films represent different layers of the same battle that made us forget other possibilities for living with water.

The film is not entirely detached from the research that led me to this valley and enabled me to meet the shepherds. Excerpts from my field diaries and research notes become a narrative that unfolds new layers and connects us with expanded geographies and deep time. In a way, it offers an additional route, providing threads to the nomadic pastoralist ecological knowledge and its complex historical context in Çukurova and beyond.

The question of how I could share this narrative had a certain answer: without dominating the sound of the landscape and our conversation. The text layer was born from this answer. Also, I have a Çukurova dialect in the film; it is me in the field, and the narrative is me on my desk, looking at the field. Adding this narrative as text, I found a way to show this distance difference, which is a confusing experience I have in my research.

Friendship and interest in each other’s work. Zeynep is so talented, and I feel lucky to be friends with her and be part of the joint creative processes. Every time I listen to her live performances, her music takes me somewhere in my head, pulls out a scene or an installation and lets me imagine it differently. Both tracks I used in the film were existing works, and Zeynep was open to my working with them. And so, while editing, I also let her pieces guide me. Honestly, Burak suggested the first piece, The Same Moonlight, and he also used it in his last film. We were listening to the same track the whole year while editing in different rooms. The other piece, Mountains Moves Like Clouds, was Zeynep’s earlier work, which helped me narrate the archival footage in a completely different direction.