Starting from the çekçek (fig VI), the narrative zooms out to an abandoned piece of land (fig IX) which was later occupied by waste pickers as a warehouse, in Bostancı, Istanbul, where I resided for over 20 years, then a network of garbage containers (fig XI,XIII), and then a larger formation (fig XVI) that embodies these fragments as the collective memory and habitat of the discarded commons in Istanbul. 

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Elements of waste, waste work and discarded ecology move beyond their physical forms, defining a fluid dimension: a ‘landscape that keeps rewriting its memories.’ These stories reveal how waste pickers navigate identity, relationships, and belonging within marginalized afterlives. They translate into spaces acknowledging social exclusion, resilience and precarity.
We imagine the concept of precarity and uncertainty to be an exception to how the world works and relate it with terms like crisis and what ‘drops out’ from the system. What if as Anna Tsing suggests, precarity is the condition of our time, rather than  an exception?

Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. A çekçek’s-length lets the çekçekçis and the ecology of waste speak, not because they will save us, but perhaps because they are the imaginative forces of a future we do not yet know, of a world we do not yet recognize.