Carrier Bag Walks
I. Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden, Istanbul, 2017
with Dilşad Aladağ & Eda Aslan, KHAS
II. Kosutnjak Forest, Belgrade, WCSCD, 2022 with WCSCD
III. Snagov Forest, Bucharest, Station, 2023 with tranzit.ro

In her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction written in 1986, Ursula K. Le Guin references anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s claim that the first device made by the human species was not the spear but probably a recipient, a container to hold gathered products, and a carrier bag. In the temperate and tropical regions of the world, people mostly sustained themselves with plants and occasionally caught small animals and fish which required containers and nets to gather, catch and bring home. Hunting on the other hand required a spear, a different and durable object with which to stab and kill. Although less occurring, this event nevertheless made for an exciting story–with action and a hero. It is a story of domination and killing, one which Ursula le Guin continues to state she has never felt part of, neither have I. But “the trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story,” she adds.

Gathering has been and still is a steady and peaceful act which still makes the world go around. It gives me relief to think that the first invention of my own kind was one which held many different things together rather than kill and cut to pieces. In gathering, one practices the “arts of noticing”. It involves the noticing of seeds, roots, growth, transformations, decay, cycles, beginnings and ends, differences and diversity. A container, a bag, a vessel is made to hold everything together– entangled, assembled and collected.

We walk while thinking about dispossession, earth, history, future, care and all the complexities a geography embodies and collect and gather matter and thoughts in order to constellate new earthen imaginaries.

Part of this text is from the exhibition introduction for The Garden of (not) Forgetting by Dilşad Aladağ and Eda Aslan, first exhibited at DEPO, Istanbul, 2021 and at Jewish Museum of Franconia, 2022.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986)
Anna Lowenhaupt  Tsing, The mushroom at the end of the world : on the possibility of life in
capitalist ruins (2015)