Earthmoving: extractivism, war, and visuality in Northern Kurdistan

In Earthmoving (University of Texas, 2025), author Eray Çaylı explores how contemporary art and media interact with environmental violence and war in Northern Kurdistan.

Extractivism—exploiting the earth for resources—has long driven racial capitalism and colonialism. And yet, how does extractivism operate in a world where ecological and humanitarian sensibilities are unprecedentedly widespread? Eray Çaylı argues it mobilises these sensibilities in new ways. Extractivism is no longer only about moving the earth—displacing peoples, fossils, minerals, and waters—but also leaving those who witness this violent displacement sentimentally moved.

In Earthmoving, Çaylı conceptualizes this duality. Derived from Çaylı’s years-long work in Northern Kurdistan, home to the world’s largest stateless nation—rendered stateless by colonial policies since the nineteenth century—Earthmoving focuses on the 2010s, a decade that began with peace talks between Turkey and the Kurdish liberation movement but ended with war. The decade saw extractivism intensify in the region and images of its harm proliferate across art and media. 

Together with contemporary artists, Çaylı shows that images challenge extractivism both by making its harm visible and by fostering self-reflexive and reciprocal collaboration that breaks with its valuation of the colonized and the racialized only in quantifiable and marketable terms.

About the author

Eray Çaylı is a professor of human geography with a focus on violence and security in the Anthropocene at the University of Hamburg and a visiting fellow at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey, coeditor of Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe, and a member of the Journal of Visual Culture's editorial collective.

In conversation with

Ekin Kurtiç is Assistant Professor in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is an environmental and political anthropologist with interdisciplinary interests in environmental justice, infrastructure-led development, state and technopolitics, and rural futures. She is currently writing her first book, Sediments of the future: Building dams, repairing nature in the Çoruh Basin, examining state-led nature restoration projects implemented in tandem with large dam construction. Most recently, she has embarked on a historical ethnographic research project on militarized ecologies, focusing on the Turkish military’s role in afforestation and tree planting.

Practicalities

This lunchtime event is hosted by Esra Özyürek, Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths & Shared Values at the University of Cambridge. Professor Çaylı will also contribute to an undergraduate class around religious encounters and the environment.

External guests are welcome to attend the book talk. Please note that access to the Faculty of Divinity is limited by ongoing works to an adjacent building.