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 studies, I was already aware of climate change, but I did not yet take it seriously. I knew Al Gore’s work, but the capitalist solutions he put forward —replace your light bulbs with energy-saving ones and drive hybrid— I could not take seriously. When a… 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 her DCFA Fellowship, Sarah Ichioka is here in person! We reflect on the lessons learned and dive into which regenerative initiatives and programmes are already underway on the ground in the Netherlands, and how these connect with wider movements towards the restoration of planetary health. How can… 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 the summer due to Covid-19, was organized by artist-in-residence Selçuk Balamir. A self-professed ‘postcapitalist designer’, he challenges the status quo of the design world, which in his view is too dependent on capitalist, and thus exploitative principles. Not just of the natural environment, but also… 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 and forms of non-belonging. Khensani de Klerk proposed a more fluid spatial lexicon for ‘beyonding’ architectural typologies. Darinka Czischke surveyed a wide range of collaborative housing models. Following a delicious vegan lunch at Recycl’Art, the afternoons were dedicated to workshops that were hard to choose from. Much gratitude to Els… 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 we will look back and say, “obviously”. But until yesterday, it wasn’t clear if radical, global emission reductions could be enforceable to a private entity. Today, a judge in the Hague ruled that the multinational, which operates in 80 countries, has to nearly halve its… 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 community, co-developed a design and convinced a bank. Even the pandemic couldn’t stop us. We went through the most critical phases of this process without being able to physically come together. Now we are entering the very last stage. At the end of this month, Gemeente… 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 Selçuk Balamir. To Selçuk, sweet dreams are made of self-built housing coops. How does one get to that point? ‘I have to give a shoutout to my parents here. One is a city planner, the other an architect. So the imagination of building something was… 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? The movements fighting for Climate Justice. Disruptive troublemakers on the frontlines, resilient life defenders at the grassroots, and generous caregivers behind the scenes: together we dream, together we move, together we fight, together we change, and together we build. All my hope, all my trust… 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 fair transition for workers, nor compensate damaged communities, nor repair the countless ecosystems that your operations have devoured. So this is why Shell Must Fall. But don’t worry, we are not gonna question you on any of these things today. Instead, we are here to… 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 visibility for our intersected struggles within our movement, we create this almost fractal movement where at each scale you reproduce the multiplicity, diversity and therefore the strength of our movement. interview #2 Equally excited to share my first ever Mexican publication! Spanish speakers who’ve been… 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 staging our anger until hypocrisy is eradicated from all cultural institutions. We will bring the End of the Fossil Fuel Age and usher a Fossil Free Culture that cherishes the fragility of life, and art. And we are not joking. 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 major destruction and loss. But they have many positive externalities as well. We would not have tin cans if Napoleon had not urged his engineers to invent a way to conserve food. We would not have computers, if the Germans had not wanted to conquer… 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 bright green fantasies. The result is a —perhaps too simplistic— ‘us and them’ polarisation, and yet I am quite satisfied with the ending; the couplings made with the making/sharing/loving triad are meant to imply emancipated labour, stewardship of the commons and the production of commons.… 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 any slideshow-with-a-Nobel-prize telling you to change the lightbulbs. 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 the documentary form in artistic practice. He had a special interest in the sea and its economy. The prologue of the movie you are about to see opens with a striking question about this relation: “the dike protects the village from the sea, but what… 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 that “stimulate local potential, foster regional development and ensure their sustainability”. Driven by neoliberal growth objectives and integration into world markets, Istanbul, the emergent financial capital of the region, presents itself as an ambiguous setting for initiating the “next industrial revolution”. This contradiction is traceable… 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 contours reveal little, CCTV cameras are assumed to contain an electronic eye that is used to remotely monitor —and periodically record— places and people. They are said to be ‘watching over’ what is considered valuable and, by extension, under risk: public spaces, busy intersections, transport… 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 innovators and urban policymakers. The concepts of ‘sharing’, ‘openness’, ‘grassroots’ and ‘circularity’ (reminding “Small, Local, Open and Connected” by Ezio Manzini) are perhaps used mostly as buzzwords, without particular interest or awareness in their full political-economy implications, but there is visibly an increased desire and interest in collective, participatory, citizen-driven, bottom-up… 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 I found harder to translate into symbols. Suggestions welcome! 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 zero interest in a commercial design job. Being a freelancer would still be acceptable, but it would not satisfy my —yet undefined— social/political interest in design. I decided to take a year off and try figuring out the politics that would drive my practice. Read more