- Jan 14
- 2 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
ARCHIVO LAB | Visual Artist 2026
DILŞAD ALADAĞ
Germany
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Dilşad Aladağ is a researcher and practitioner working across the fields of contemporary art, architecture and film. Her practice explores the politics of landscapes and their relationship to knowledge production, employing archival and field research, speculative narratives and material inquiry. Dilşad is a PhD student at the Arts and Design programme at Bauhaus University Weimar, studying as a Heinrich Böll Foundation Fellow. Her practice-based research engages with the entangled histories and ecologies of nomadic pastoralists and the landscape of southern Anatolia. Her works have been presented at Kunsthaus Hamburg, DEPO İstanbul, the Jewish Museum of Franconia, DAADgalerie Berlin, SALT, SAVVY, IASPIS and Praksis Oslo, as well as supported by various grants.
LAB PROJECT
THE ONES WHO MOVE SLOWLY
The Ones Who Move Slowly unearths the seasonal migration route of the Aydınlı nomadic pastoralists and related ecological knowledge through archival and situated research, as well as essayistic filmmaking engaging with Ulla Johansen’s Anatolian Ethnology Collection. The collection captures the German/Estonian researcher’s 1956–57 fieldwork with the Aydınlı, where she traced genealogies while recording nomadic life and crafts with an urgency: ‘What if your children don’t learn how to heal a camel? One should document it.’ However, as the extractivist logics of the Turkish state claimed the nomadic landscape, most pastoralists had to abandon the seasonal migration and their camels. In 2024–25, I retraced Aydınlı’s seasonal routes, also thinking of landscape as an archive. Johansen’s photographs and notes bore witness to the changing landscape, guiding me to meet the last remaining nomads and herds in the region where I grew up, and facilitating a dialogue with pastoralists and ecological knowledge. Relating her archive led to reflections on the urge and desire for research and positionality within suppressed ecologies. The process develops into a film, weaving research into a multispecies micro-narrative that interlaces Johansen’s archives with recordings from the present. It traces how landscapes once hosted nomadic pastoralists’ moved freely have been commodified by dams, mines, forestry and agrarian industries, yet still bear traces of ecological knowledge and resilience.
