KOLAN Handmade Kolan, Wire,  Sound Installation, 2025, 400 x 500 x 150 cm

This artwork emerged during my artist-in-residence program in Ordu, a city on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. Created in collaboration with Gülser, a 70-year-old craftswoman who continues the disappearing tradition of making kolan (hand-woven carrying straps), the work reflects on the intimate entanglement between cultural loss and ecological destruction.

The piece draws a structural parallel between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature. In the Black Sea region, cyanide-based gold mining devastates ecosystems, erasing not only landscapes but also the cultural memory embedded in hand-produced objects, intergenerational practices, and rural life-worlds.

Once, the woven kolan straps crafted meticulously by women allowed harvested hazelnut baskets to rest gently on the shoulder, designed not to wound the body. Today, plastic straps have replaced them, faster, cheaper, sharper, more alien. As hazelnut orchards are sacrificed in the pursuit of extractive profit, the cultural objects produced by women are likewise endangered by capitalism’s economies of speed, disposability, and erasure.

This Project was supported​ by SIS Art Residency Program, Collaboration with Gülser Teyze, Sound Designer: Cem Önsoy