This story is part of our Impact Stories series, spotlighting our fellows who, drawing on socially engaged arts, help communities across Europe confront past experiences, address present challenges, and imagine new futures. Here, Ceren describes how local communities in Turkey are documenting and pushing back against urban and environmental inequality.
I first encountered Mekanda Adalet Derneği, the Center for Spatial Justice, shortly after its founding in 2016. It felt like an opportunity to do meaningful work in Istanbul, bringing together communities, artists, and researchers confronting different forms of injustice. I was drawn to the possibility that these collaborations wouldn’t just make these injustices visible, but that they would help us resist them.
Center for Spatial Justice mobilises storytelling and the arts to have a tangible impact on urban and environmental harms. We’ve worked with people who have lost their homes to dam constructions, residents whose tap water has been contaminated by mining activities, and communities impacted by climate change. We build long-term, trust-based relationships with these groups to imagine alternative ecological futures, alongside artists, researchers, activists, and civil society actors.
Our Menderes River Basin study is one such example.
Through long-term engagement with affected villages, we created a public programme that enabled villagers to share their experiences in their own words. At a panel discussion we organised, Hatice Kocalar – a 75-year-old woman targeted with a lawsuit by a mining company for refusing to surrender her land – spoke about her struggle. When a video of her testimony was later shared, it reached more than half a million views on social media and attracted national media attention.
On another occasion, we walked the route of the planned Canal Istanbul project with local residents, documenting their stories on digital storytelling platform FollowtheRiver.org. We later translated these encounters into an interactive mapping installation featuring video testimonies, allowing audiences to experience these landscapes through the voices of the people who live there.
Our work includes exhibitions, workshops, artistic interventions, and collaborative publications, but our focus isn’t on art as an end product. Instead, it’s on the process itself – of listening, of co-creation, and of shared reflection. This work has shown us that socially engaged art can create meaningful change by strengthening connections, fostering visibility, and enabling communities to tell their own stories. At a time when civic space is shrinking and spatial injustices are intensifying, I believe this work is essential.
Explore more stories of socially engaged arts driving change across Europe. View the Stories of Impact map here.
