Northern Forests
Artist in Residence 2015/2016 from Berlin in Istanbul Julia Lazarus is presneting her movie Northern Forests within the exhibition IN THE BLINK OF A BIRD until July 16th at DEPO Istanbul.
During her six-month scholarship stay in Istanbul supported by the Berlin Senate, she began to work on a film about the impact of the gigantic construction and infrastructure measures in the Istanbul metropolitan area, which are currently being massively promoted by the Turkish government. Together with the ecological activist group Kuzey Ormanlari Savunmasi, K.O.S., she visited construction sites, took part in the meetings of local residents and got an insight into the organized civilian resistance to the capital-driven destruction of the community’s living space.
The film accompanies the economic struggle and questions the societal necessity of a profit-oriented development. It asks also about our concept of nature, which we imagine as a wilderness and a retreat away from our metropolitan life, while we find ourselves daily in man-made and controlled environments.
For a talk on May 30 at Depo Julia Lazarus invited the ecological movement Northern Forest Defense to present and discuss their cause with the audience, while selected scenes of the film are displayed in the background. Mehmet Baki Deniz (NFD) will give a presentation about the current situation in the northern forests and the continuing threat faced by the last existing forests, water basins and farm lands, endemic plant and animal species due to the expansion of the metropolitan areas.
Julia Lazarus is a filmmaker, artist and curator based in Berlin, Germany. Since 2001 she realized a number of film and videoworks in distribution at sixpackfilm vienna and e-flux, Berlin/New York.
The exhibition project In The Blink Of A Bird is the product of a collaborative work initiated by a group of individuals who pursue the possibilities of collective production, and reflect on the ways and methods of thinking, acting, departing and deciding together. The project which is hosted by the Apartment Project was launched in 2016.