Merve Bedir: Scaffolds for the Common
Living Thought series
Thursday, 29 January
17:00 - 19:00
The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (Sala Noua Galerie)
Entrance from Str. Monetăriei 3
The conversations in the Living Thought series continues througout January to May 2026, part of the programme Cultivators of Life organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest.
Coordinated by Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, the conversations in Living Thought aim to introduce contemporary scholars and artists who are working in the emerging field of knowledge and practices relating to land, to indigenous/ancestral knowledges and eco-social realities, and who are proposing not only reviews of problems, but visionary alternative paths. Continuing of the ongoing work of the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, the intellectual conversations in Living Thought are tools of conviviality aiming to spark the radical imagination needed to change our relations to culture, to re-orient our sense of the world, and to regain an ethical life outside the ongoing war on life.
The proposition for this gathering was originally titled as the following: Design as/for scaffolding the intervals, collectivities, common, commons, neighbourship. The aim in this lengthy choice of words was to emphasize the agency as much as interrogating the capacity of creative interventions in supporting in these agencies.
Departing from the urgencies of perpetual disasters, the erasure of livelihoods by monocultural reconstruction programs, and the ethics of collaboration for sustenance, the gathering will focus on questions of design’s operation within the infrastructural gaps, and scaffolding for possible collectivities.
This presentation by Merve Bedir will build on the different roles she took on, the scales of intervention, and the ways she worked within situated practices that she selects from Maritsa River in Plovdiv, DEMKA steel factory workers’ learning structures, mangroves and villages of Deep Bay in Hong Kong, Kitchen Workshop in Gaziantep.
Short Bio
Merve Bedir practices architecture and landscape design as expanded infrastructures of hospitality and mobility. A path of her work refers to the collective intelligences and imaginaries of the landscape. Merve is the co-founder of Aformal Academy in Shenzhen, and founding member of Kitchen Workshop in Gaziantep and Center for Spatial Justice in Istanbul. Her recent design projects include Basecamp entrance space and tent interventions in Utrecht, the Netherlands, an industrial kitchen in Gaziantep and Postane simple repair project in Istanbul, Turkey. She has a PhD from Delft University of Technology, and a BArch from Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Merve has taught in Hong Kong University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and Columbia GSAPP. Her work was reviewed in The Guardian, Avery Review, and Frieze Magazine. She has taken part in Istanbul Design Biennale (several editions), Urbanism and Architecture Biennale Shenzhen (several editions), Sao Paulo Architecture Biennale (2017), Venice Architecture Biennale (2021); and most recently exhibited in BAK Utrecht (2023), Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (2023), and Salt Istanbul (2025). Recent publications include Infrastructure and Repair (Afterall Magazine, and Canadian Center for Architecture).
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The event is part of the program Cultivators of Life, a multianual project organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest Association and co-financed by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The program continues and supports the activities started in 2021 at the Experimental Research Station for Research on Art and Life in Siliștea Snagovului, focused on conserving biodiversity, testing ecological prototypes, and rethinking the relationship between soils, materials and artistic production. Curated by Adelina Luft, the program proposes the study and formulation of a new lexicon and practices related to an emerging relationship between indigenous/ancestral knowledge, land cultivation and natural sciences, realized through a series of artistic residencies, open events in gardens around Bucharest, applied workshops, conferences with indigenous thinkers and a final group in 2026 at MODEM – Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen.
The program does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the program's content or any use to which the program outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
