Since 2023, my artistic and research practice has focused on the Hevsel Gardens in Diyarbakır. Yet my relationship with Hevsel reaches much further back; it is a landscape I have moved through since childhood, witnessing its gradual transformations over many years. Over time, this awareness developed into a long-term research process exploring the intersections of ecology, memory, conflict, and everyday life.

My first research-based project on Hevsel, Aktif Peyzajlar (Active Landscapes), was supported by CultureCIVIC in 2024. The research later continued through Hevsel: Traces of Encounters, an installation produced for the exhibition Sediment at < rotor > Centre for Contemporary Art in Graz. Through field observations, aerial imagery, and biomaterials produced from organic matter collected in the area, I traced the ecological transformations taking place within the gardens.

This ongoing research approaches the Hevsel Gardens as a landscape marked by intertwined histories of ecological destruction, urban warfare, and collective memory. I am particularly interested in how the aftermath of the 2015–16 conflict in Sur continues to reverberate through the Hevsel landscape and surrounding environments. Rather than focusing only on visible destruction, the project examines how violence persists through indirect and often invisible forms embedded in soil, water, everyday routines, fear, and fragmented memory.

Drawing from the notion of “haunted landscapes,” the project considers the environment as a living archive shaped by absences, residues, and traces that remain after conflict. During the fellowship period in Berlin, I aim to deepen this research through reading, archival investigation, reflection, and conversations. At this stage, the process intentionally remains open-ended, allowing the research to evolve gradually and determine its own possible forms of public engagement over time.

Rozelin Akgün is an artist and researcher based in Diyarbakır (Amed). Trained in landscape architecture, her practice brings together biomaterials, ecological processes, scientific inquiry, and local knowledge systems. Through sustained research and material experimentation, she explores materiality, the agency of matter, and the entangled temporalities between bodies, environments, and more-than-human life. Her installations often remain unstable in form, emerging as dynamic and fluid systems shaped by transformation, decay, and renewal. Working with living and ephemeral substances, she reflects on permeability, fragility, coexistence, and ecological memory.
Her recent exhibitions and projects include States of the Earth, Yapı Kredi Culture and Arts, Istanbul (2024); Sediment, < rotor > Centre for Contemporary Art, Graz (2024); Upcycle Istanbul Art & Design Festival, Müze Gazhane, Istanbul (2025); Triangle: A Dialogue, Rast Gallery, Istanbul (2025); and SaDe, Saint Benoît French High School, Istanbul (2025).