2025 BIG Architecture Festival, Portorož

An AI-assisted digital collage was created for the “The City of the Future” exhibition, organized within the framework of BIG SEE (Center for Creative Economy of Southeast Europe), held in Portorož. The exhibited work focuses on the post-earthquake destruction in Hatay and a prospective vision for the reconstruction and future development of the city.

Hatay, After the 2023 Earthquake:

'Leveled to the Ground' Vs. ‘Becoming One with the Ground’

In September, six months after the Hatay earthquake of February 2023, I traveled to Hatay as part of a research project. By the time I arrived, night was about to fall. Driving along the Asi River, I felt chills running through my body, my eyes brimming with tears. Six months had passed since the earthquake, yet the city still lay in ruins. What stood before me was not a city but a massive expanse of debris.

There were no roads, no streets, no buildings — not even a sense of time. Everywhere was rubble, construction waste. Trucks were coming to collect the steel from the wreckage; others were hauling debris out of the city. Six months had passed, but there was neither hope nor any sign of life.

When darkness fell, the city was engulfed in pitch-black silence. Only in the areas where the container settlements stood could one see the stadium-like lights piercing through the night sky. Rows and rows of container camps stretching endlessly along the roads…Only the signs at their entrances differed; life inside them was always the same. Rows upon rows — hundreds, thousands of containers.

The provincial director of AFAD had said, “Ninety-four percent of the city has been leveled”. A city where 94% of its people now live in container settlements. Even today, two years later, it is still a city of containers.

Experiencing this — seeing it, feeling it, hearing it — makes you begin to question things from a completely different place. It reshapes how you imagine the future:

A city that is not destroyed by an earthquake,

A city that cannot be leveled because it is already one with the ground.

To imagine a life rooted in the earth — within it, on it, as part of it.

To envision an entirely different future.

And it makes you ask, quietly but insistently:

Is it truly possible to become one with the ground?

May, 2025.