ANCIENT FUTURES · 2025
Humanity & Borders
Site-responsive video installation · St. Benois Church, Istanbul · 2025
Humanity and Borders is a site-responsive video installation presented at St. Benois Church, examining borders as physical, social and psychological constructions.
The work originated from an encounter with the landscape between North and South Korea. On both sides of the border, the same vegetation continues, the same sky unfolds, birds move freely, fish cross the water, and animals leave their traces without regard for territorial divisions. Only humans are stopped by the boundaries they have constructed themselves.
Installed across an existing metal threshold within the church, the moving image transforms the act of crossing into both a spatial and symbolic gesture. Within the historical and spiritual architecture of the site, the border becomes a material condition as well as a metaphor for the invisible structures that regulate movement, belonging and possibility.
The installation extends through a series of spine-like sculptural works developed over the past three years for archaeological and historical sites including Mount Nemrut and the ancient city of Aizanoi. Positioned alongside the bodies of the viewers, these structures establish a dialogue between living and constructed spines, between past and future, and between biological and technological systems.
Generative processes and code are embedded throughout both the moving image and the sculptural language of the work. Organic forms behave like cells, fish or migrating organisms: merging, separating and passing through one another within a continuously evolving habitat. Sounds of birds, the city and the surrounding church environment further dissolve the distinction between digital and natural space.
Humanity and Borders proposes a living environment without a fixed definition of boundary — a space shaped instead by permeability, interconnection and coexistence. The work ultimately asks whether the structures humanity has built to divide itself can also be transformed through individual and collective will.
- Concept, image
- Ecem Dilan Köse
- Occasion
- 212 Photography Festival
- Place
- St. Benois Church, İstanbul