Irem Aydemir

Brief Bio:

Irem is a political scientist, filmmaker and a doctoral student in Anthropology at University of California, Davis. As a little explorer, she participated in academia, audiovisual storytelling, and civil society work with oppressed people in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. She produced works on memory, migration, cultural heritage, decolonization, and political conflicts in the East Mediterranean. Her debut ethnographic short film Tuning Into The Verge (2019), looking at the general elections  in Greece from the viewpoint of a Kurdish refugee who’s been living there for almost four decades, was screened in various film festivals in Europe, the United States, and Turkey. After another ethnographic research on cultural resistance through performance art  in Palestine, her current doctoral research is on the same lines among Arabic speaking communities but this time in Antakya (Antioch) Turkey, which happens to be her birthplace. 

Project Abstract:

“If you’re in a hurry, what’s your business in Datça?” is a local proverb in the southwestern peninsula of Anatolia. It looks like a slightly melted crayon, held horizontally. Its connection to the mainland is about two kilometers wide. Its westernmost tip hosts a Greek ancient city called Knidos, which divides the Aegean Sea and the Southern Mediterranean. Locals, some of whom distinct themselves from the rest of the country with a kind of a pride which sheds a light on sociopolitical cleavages that the nation-state has been experiencing in the last century, talk about three B’s in Datça: Bal (Honey), Badem (Almond), Balık (Fish). Beehives are under threat given the recent wildfires in the region, almond producers suffer from a lyme disease - which can be cured with a chemical anti-pesticide but beekeepers think it’s a terrible idea as it might kill their bees), and fish is almost non-existent due to the malpractice of fishing several decades back. The peninsula is a home to hundreds of endemic fauna and flora species, used to host more. Incredible amount of infrastructure issues, as well as water shortage is suffered by its human and other-than-human inhabitants. Some of its boars have already left their wildlife habitat and live as nuclear

families in green parts of residential areas. Locals are engaged in activism against privatization of certain territories, which hold a significant historical and ecological value, also against excessive tourism activities. This project aims to capture a glimpse of the challenges that the laid-back and cheerful culture of Datça has been experiencing due to the recent ecological and capitalist crises, which are extremely intertwined.

Social Media(s): https://www.linkedin.com/in/iremaydemir/, https://twitter.com/iremxyd