Taklak

For this week’s WEDDING AFFAIRS Wednesday, we invite you with our team from United Screens to a screening program where artists invoke a site specific audio visual experience that challenges our conceptions of cinema and performance.

In this session, we welcome Dilşad Aladağ and her performative screening TAKLAK. This programme travels among archives and follows the footsteps of botanists merged in landscape. Taklak is a plant that is at home in the Mediterranean, it is also known by other names such as Zamzarik on the southern coasts, Koutsoupia on the islands, Arguvan and Dara Cihûda in the mountains that cross borders, Judah Tree in religious books, and Cercis Siliquastrum in Latin.

The project TAKLAK pays visits to various plants, searches for the different representations of a plant, and explores the dreams and myths of the lands along the coasts of the Mediterranean. Thinking about and around how a plant can create intercultural belonging, Taklaks are transformed from objects of nostalgia to companions of resilience. The journey is not only about findings and meetings but also about loss and exclusion. The duality of being both here and there, belonging or not belonging to Germany as a part of the diaspora.

As an artistic and archival research, TAKLAK traverses the fields of etymology, ecology, and botany while dealing with the representations of unknown territories, climates, and languages. This is a story of gathering. This is a story of foraging. Seeds, names, meanings, symbols, stories, testimonies, and memories in notebooks, boxes, and bags are rooted and unrooted, spreading around and spinning round.

Dilşad Aladağ is an architect and urbanist whose practice is grounded in art, research, heritage and ecology. Her focus lies in examining the historiography of transformations with a particular emphasis on spatial and ecological subjects and the performances of power and resilience.

Delving into multi-species processes and stories surrounding these transformations through archival and field research shapes her artistic process. She reveals intersections, overlaps, conflicts and other forms of constellations to shape narratives through them as possibilities for poetic and political dialogues. Currently she is a doctorate student at the Bauhaus University Arts and Design PhD Program.