Buket Yenidogan

The Ones Who Became the Ocean is a multimedia project which explores oceanic spirituality through a speculative mythology based on my research combining posthuman theories, maternal loss and ecological policy-making.

It builds an alternative past for an alternative future enacted through rituals, storytelling and experimental device-making, to teleport the audience to this dreamy but familiar ancient future where they can follow the path of “the ones who became the ocean,” collaborating with Open AI GPT-3 generative text-based artificial intelligence.

While it draws on ideas from hydro-feminism, the project also critically questions our current ideologies as the main driving force of the Anthropocene, climate crises and mass extinction.

The installation consists of a moving image work narrating future mythology through a meditative poem, a speculative technological device called the “ocean-maker” which uses biofeedback to transform breathing sound into the sounds of waves crashing to the ocean shore in real-time, and the mirror-like coins with that this alternative society use depicting their values through deities, centred around a ritual instrument with plastic umbilical cord. The latex fabric hanging from the ceiling is custom-made using sand from the UK coast. It represents human skin thickening through our immigration from ocean to land, land to ocean. The installation is multi-sensory utilising the smell of ocean in the breath related works.

During my research process, I created this performance piece as a way of thinking-through-making. It uses improvised sound-making through an experimental musical instrument incorporating hydrophones to make water sounds and 360 ambisonic soundscapes combining the excerpts of real-world interviews I hold with an environmental policy-making consultant, a woman who experienced abortion and the Becoming a Body of Water essay of Astrida Neimanis. It forms a rhizomatic narrative weaving the wet worlds of ocean futures, maternal loss and hydro-feminism. The experimental musical instrument later became a part of my final installation as the ritual instrument piece.

Ritual of Rejoin is a short film that depicts the believers of an oceanic spirituality enacting a mythologic event. In a far away future, a group of women practise a ritual to rejoin the ocean. The ocean is a mother, a nurturer and a torturer for them. An unexpected attendee of the ritual starts the turn of events that changes the path of humanity towards a cetaceanic dream as the narrator reveals their identity in a meditative poem.

This short movie also follows the form of a guided meditation aiming to draw the viewer into this ritual experience where the sounds of breaths mix with the sounds of the ocean.

Screened in Boat Live Works London, IKLECTIK London UK, Kunst(ZEUG)Haus Rapperswill and KAMMGARN WEST Schaffhausen in Switzerland.

To see the full movie please click here.

These works belongs to my previous research theme, forming empathy and intimacy with trees.