Imagine a poet titling his work on forced displacement and genocide simply as "Trave." What happens when over one million people are forcibly displaced, exiled, and massacred in the early 20th century? Their stolen lands, vacated properties, and erased houses of worship stand as haunting reminders of a sanitized and contested history. This talk focuses on the Armenian displacement, unraveling the complex dynamics between top-down bureaucratic processes of forced mobility and bottom-up acts of memory, material resilience, and solidarity in the post-genocide world. Drawing on title deeds, legal documents, seedlings, construction materials, and property ownership laws, the talk reconstructs a history of international humanitarianism in the Eastern Mediterranean, juxtaposed with the silenced and criminalized narratives of orphan care, experimental pedagogies, and environmental interventions in Turkey. While the plethora of materials pertaining to international humanitarianism shed light on the emergence of racial categories directed at the Ottoman millets at the end of the empire, the silenced and fragmented archives of Armenian agencies in Turkey explain local responses to sustainability, land cultivation, and climate adaptation. Through this lens, the talk examines how architectural history and representation can piece together fragmented, ruined, and silenced heritage, sparking a broader conversation on the ethics and politics of making the unspeakable speakable.
Speaker
Aslıhan Günhan is an assistant professor at Bilkent University Department of Architecture and a postdoctoral fellow at MIT’s Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture. She received her PhD in the History of Architecture and Urban Development Program at Cornell University in 2023. Her first book project, tentatively titled “Unsettled Grounds: Armenian Displacement, Property Dispossession, and Post-Ottoman Architectural Worldmaking,” is an architectural study of the displacement of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire, their silenced legacy in the built environment and the contested modernity in Turkey which crafts a legal basis for the confiscation of properties, dispossession of ex-citizens and bureaucracy of denial. Günhan’s research has garnered support from numerous institutions, including the Getty Research Institute, SSRC IDRF, Fulbright Program, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Einaudi Center Institute for European Studies, and SALT Research.
Moderated by SOF Fellow Maura Lucking
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