The Echo
Yerin Ekosu (appl. in 2021)
University campuses are often understood through their architectural form or ecological features, yet rarely through the lived relationships that bind these elements together. We were interested in approaching campus not as a collection of buildings and landscapes, but as a living assemblage, where ecology, architecture, history, and everyday life continuously interact. Middle East Technical University, one of the three world’s modern heritage campuses, offered a unique setting to explore how a place can be understood “from within life” perspective, through direct sensory and affective engagement.
Echo of the Place seeks to cultivate an ecologically grounded and emotionally attuned understanding of a university campus. Rather than observing the environment from a distance, participants engage with it through their senses, movements, and shared musical experiences. The aim is to reveal the interconnectedness of people, built form, landscape, and atmosphere, and to make visible the affective assemblages that emerge through inhabiting place and collective perception, emotion, and experience.
Echo of the Place adopts music as a dynamic interpretive lens. Instead of using music to describe place, it weaves music into the spatial experience itself. Through listening, vocalizing, and improvising, participants co-generate the musicality of the campus setting both physical and natural parts. Music becomes a medium for sensing relationships between trees and pathways, buildings and open spaces, memory and present use. This approach allows participants to become active interpreters and co-creators of the place’s affective qualities. By merging ecological awareness, architectural understanding, and performative practice, Echo of the Place opens new ways of perceiving and articulating the living integrity of campus.
The program unfolds in five interconnected phases. In Sensory Activation, participants follow a carefully selected route highlighting ecologically and architecturally significant sites. During Dialogue Creation, they establish shared meanings through collective sensory and acoustic engagement with the eco-campus system. The Transformation in Perception phase invites participants to disrupt habitual routines and experience familiar spaces from unexpected perspectives. Through Accumulation of Information, they gather knowledge beyond the visible and known by exploring layered ecological and spatial relationships. Finally, in Collective Connection, participants vocally improvise the timbre of the campus, translating their embodied experiences into shared sound. Through this cyclical process, campus is not only studied but it is listened to, felt, and collectively reimagined.
Main Goal
The Echo of the METU adopts a “from within life” perspective in an understanding and interpreting an ecologically and architecturally cohesive university campus, Middle East Technical University, one of the three modern heritage campuses in the world. The intention is to increase the awareness of all components, relationships and integrity of the place through sensory and performatic experiences with the place.
Art Interfaces
Improvised music making.
Place/s
The Middle East Technical University (METU) campus, developed since the 1950s, exemplifies an integrated approach to education, landscape, and ecology. The Yalıncak Forest, created through long-term reforestation, is central to this vision, supporting biodiversity, regulating microclimate, and embodying the university’s commitment to environmental stewardship and collective memory.
Story
We see music as an interface for noticing the wholeness of life in a place, containing and reflecting all beings, ecology, history, culture, and the physical environment. We do not use music as an instrument to represent the place but integrate music into a spatial experience to initiate the construction of affective assemblages and thereby open new avenues for the participants to look and reflect at a place differently.
Participants explored the ecological and architectural essence of METU campus through mapping connections, nurturing interactions, and empowering active participation. They engaged in co-generating the musicality of the place, becoming the architects of affective assemblages as a result of that experience. We accentuated the affective assemblages emerging as a result of place experiences and activated basic human senses to construct an ecologically equal perspective about a place.
Echo of the Place embraces music as a dynamic lens, revealing the vibrant interconnectedness of life. Rather than merely representing a location, music becomes seamlessly woven into the spatial experience, sparking emotional connections and meaningful interactions.