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The Vegetal Archive: Artistic Research on Urban Ecology and Cultural Memory in Aşiyan Cemetery
This paper presents a vegetal archive, an artistic research project that approaches Aşiyan Cemetery in Istanbul as a layered urban space and cultural-ecological landscape where vegetal life, urban history, and artistic interpretation intersect. The project explores the relationships between these layers through fieldwork conducted in. The project approaches the cemetery not merely as a burial ground but as a layered cultural and ecological landscape in which vegetal life, urban history, and artistic interpretation intersect.
Situated on the Bosphorus hillside, Aşiyan Cemetery holds a prominent place in Istanbul’s cultural memory as the resting place of numerous influential poets, writers, intellectuals, and artists whose works shaped modern Turkish literature and thought. At the same time, the cemetery hosts a diverse range of spontaneously growing plant species that form a small yet significant ecological habitat within the dense urban fabric. The coexistence of these cultural and ecological layers positions the cemetery as a site where narratives of the city extend beyond exclusively human histories.
The project is structured as an artistic research process that combines field observation, plant collection and archiving, spatial mapping, and visual art production. During fieldwork, plant species growing within the cemetery are systematically documented, collected, and recorded according to their precise locations. These botanical findings are translated into a series of illustrated plant portraits produced through watercolor and drawing techniques. Alongside these visual studies, the project develops a botanical map of the cemetery that traces the spatial distribution of species and situates them within the cultural landscape formed by the surrounding graves.
Through this process, the research constructs an artistic herbarium and visual archive that merges botanical documentation with artistic interpretation. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space, the project considers the cemetery as a socially and ecologically produced urban environment where cultural memory, ecological processes, and everyday spatial practices intersect.
By foregrounding artistic methodologies such as collecting, mapping, illustrating, and field journaling as modes of knowledge production, the project proposes a more-than-human perspective on urban memory. In doing so, it suggests that plants inhabiting the cemetery can be understood as co-participants in the narratives of urban diversity and multiculturalism to the layered histories embedded within the city.
Bengisu Bayrak Shahmiri (Beykoz University)
Bengisu Bayrak Shahmiri is an artist, researcher, and academic based in Istanbul. She is the Dean and a faculty member of the Faculty of Art and Design at Beykoz University, Istanbul. She holds a Doctorate in Arts from Marmara University, an MBA from the University of Wales, and an MA in Film and Television Studies from Istanbul Bilgi University. Her interdisciplinary artistic practice spans painting, collage, installation, and video, and explores how visual and textual materials construct cultural memory and historical narratives. Bayrak Shahmiri’s research and artistic work examine alternative forms of storytelling, often engaging with archives, ecology, and the transformation of historical material. She is the coauthor of An Essay on the Conceptions of Significance in Contemporary Art (2019) and has published peer-reviewed articles on contemporary art, aesthetics, and visual culture. Her writings also include book chapters, interviews, and translations of influential design and art theory books into Turkish.