Selçuk Balamir

Interview published in Winq, December 2023. My parents sometimes joked that they were happy to raise an activist child. In fact, I was concerned early on with colonialism and the problems of exploitation. I realised that a safe world could not be taken for granted and that I had to relate to it. During my Read more

Environment, social justice, economy – it’s become clear that our dominant systems are broken. In her 3-month DCFA Fellowship, Singapore-based urbanist Sarah Ichioka dives deeper into the possibilities for systemic change. What promising alternative systems and regenerative practices are already emerging around the world? And who is taking the first steps towards these essential changes?  In the last part of Read more

As part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Art and Climate Change, Teresa Borasino and I discussed our shared histories and divergent trajectories in embedding art and design practices into the Climate Justice Movement. Read more

Prior to the Winter Summer School, David Keuning interviewed me about my plans and expectations in regard to my collaboration with spatial designers, the decolonial critique of eco-modernism and the relation between ecological transition and social justice. Originally published on Amsterdam Academy of Architecture Annual Newspaper 2021-2022. This year’s Winter School, which took place in Read more

On Sunday 19 June 2022, the second day of the FIBER Festival conference focusing on Collective Reorientation, I shared a (virtual) stage with Richard Seymour. Read more

Last month I took part in an incredible summerschool on urban commoning! Organised by Permanent Brussels, “Building Beyond” prosed ‘collective strategies for just cities’ through (or beyond!) the lenses of property, type and participation. Levente Polyak presented countless examples that fall in-between or beyond public and private ownership paradigms. Nishat Awan delivered a haunting, moving keynote on architectures of displacement Read more

I am proud to be one of the 17,000 co-plaintiffs alongside Milieudefensie and other organisations who sued Royal Dutch Shell. And today, we won. The court agreed that the human rights consequences of climate breakdown are more important than the company’s right to operate freely and profit from fossil fuels. This is unprecedented. One day Read more

Almost exactly three years ago, I sowed the seeds of a project that grew into something truly magnificent. The housing cooperative De Nieuwe Meent (“The New Commons”) now has a life on its own. Together with other dedicated volunteers, we have put thousands of hours of love and labour. We have won a tender competition, built a Read more

Reinilde Jonkhout interviewed me for Amsterdam Alternative about the origin story of De Nieuwe Meent! 13 december de Nieuwe Meent has started their crowdfunding campaign to realize housing in Watergraafsmeer. But how did it all get started? How does one come up with the idea to build an independent housing cooperative? An interview with initiator Read more

I was invited to the “Radical Network of Change” panel in IMPAKT Festival to talk about my activist journey. Check it out: Read more

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Here comes my teacher profile at WdKA! WdKA is delighted to welcome Selçuk Balamir, who joins our team of tutors in the academic year 2020-2021. What is your branch of knowledge and subject? I am theory tutor in New Earth / Social Practices, political agent provocateur in eco-social design. What is your source of inspiration? Read more

Excited and proud to be featured on the municipality’s website as a commoner-Amsterdammer with De Nieuwe Meent! Video is part of Natascha Hagenbeek’s “Heel de stad, Heel de aarde” catalogue: Read more

Dutch newspaper de Trouw published an interview on de Nieuwe Meent! Read more

Before we pose our question, we would like to explain why and how Shell Must Fall. As long as you remain a company that is dedicated to maximising profits and short-term shareholder value, we know you will not keep fossil fuels in the ground. We know you won’t decommission you own infrastructure, nor provide a Read more

interview #1 Just found out that Kevin’s interview on last year’s queer-feminist finger at Ende Gelände has been out there already! Honoured share a platform with my press-heroine Lindgaard Jade, and embarrassed of mansplaining eco-feminism on Transition Network —please challenge and correct me if I say anything unbearably foolish! If we can create spaces of Read more

Life is fragile, and so is art. Shell sponsors the Van Gogh Museum; the destroyer of life pretends to protect art. As a response, Fossil Free Culture NL unfurls a curtain of paper sheets in coordinated motion. Bodies are provoked and sheets are torn —but the action speaks louder than the words. We will continue Read more

“To die was merely to go on in another direction” remarks Laia Osaieo Odo, in The Day Before the Revolution, the day she passes away. Now that our very own Odo is gone, all we have left to do is to bring about her Revolution. Rest in power, comrade. Read more

One of my bachelor graduation projects in 2009 was a satirical design hoax about a ‘sustainable’ military-industrial R&D firm, intended as a critique of the pervasive greenwashing in the design world. Developed in collaboration with Mathieu Grosche and Shabnam Zeraati, the project was featured in TAZ, Bauerfeind, Ignite, Resilience and Pandemic. Wars have always caused Read more

As a followup to my ASCA Workshop paper, here comes another abstract, this time for the ACGS Inverting Globalisation conference in October. It is intended for the Session II on “Unsustainability, Precarity, Ecology”: Read more

Last month I realised that I had less than a week to submit a ‘design manifesto’ proposal for the 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial themed The Future is Not What it Used to Be. I challenged myself not to use any of my recurrent keywords (design, postcapitalism, commoning, climate, etc). I also wanted to avoid debilitating catastrophism as much as Read more

In a previous post I mentioned my favorite short animation about the climate crisis. This time I propose a complete list of essential feature length documentaries in the same topic. For a documentary junkie like myself, it is quite challenging to keep the list to the strict minimum. But rest assured; here you will not find Read more

As the 19th round of intergovernmental climate negotiations are closing in Warsaw with no reasonable outcome at sight, perhaps it is timely to have a ‘season recap’ of the story so far. The unfolding drama is of epic proportions, but how to explain the climate crisis in the times of ever-shortening attention span? Read more

Yesterday I presented The Forgotten Space at Kino Praxis. Here is roughly how I introduced the documentary: Welcome to the tribute event to Allan Sekula, who passed away this year at the age of 62. He was first a conceptual artist, then a photographer and a historian of photography, and more recently a theorist of Read more

Last week I wrote two brief paper proposals. The first one is together with Cemre for the Journal of Peer Production, publishing an issue dedicated to Shared Machine Shops: The first FabLab in Istanbul is being launched within Kadir Has, a private university, in partnership with Istanbul Development Agency, a government fund destined to projects Read more

Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Often we don’t know whether they are operational, and nothing definite is known of their effectiveness in reducing crime. How, then, do these ubiquitous camera’s -either functional or not- work? published in 2013, in Kunstlicht 34 (3), 38-42 Surveillance cameras. White, motionless and perching. Cables plugged at the rear. While their Read more

Last week I attended several sessions of Amsterdam Urban Innovation Week. The topics included cooperative enterprises, critique of growth, makers movement and the circular city. Overall it has been quite a pleasant experience to discover things that appeared radical/marginal a few years ago now slowly making their ways into the mainstream of creative practitioners, social Read more

Here is the poster I presented in a conference recently. Although it does not follow the order of my thesis, it synthesises its essential elements. This visualisation is also a work in progress; some were easier to represent with pictograms than others. Ironically, it is the most physical things (design artefact, digital manufacturing, “stuff”) that Read more

As I start my four-year-long journey of researching and writing about postcapitalist design cultures, perhaps it is time to reflect on what has brought me here. Let’s return four years backwards; I had just graduated from my design studies in Strasbourg. Having done two internships, intentionally in market-driven sectors (marketing/advertisement and luxury architecture/decoration), I had Read more