tracing the dryads
Diryadların İzinde (appl. in 2022)
When large ecosystems such as forests are damaged by natural disasters, public discourse often turns immediately to rational assessment and technical repair. Burned areas become symbols on maps, categorized and quantified, while the intricate, living networks they host remain largely invisible. Yet forests are not static “green areas”; they are dynamic, regenerative systems shaped by continuous interaction among soil, plants, animals, climate, and humans. In the aftermath of the Aegean coast fires of 2020 and 2021, we were motivated to rethink how future planners perceive such landscapes. How can we move beyond functional responses and cultivate ecological empathy?
Tracing the Dryads seeks to inspire young planning professionals to experience forests as living beings rather than abstract planning units. The program explores a forest area affected by fire, assessing its sensory, emotional, and ecological significance. By recognizing the forest as a living entity shaped by both natural and social relations, the program encourages participants to form embodied connections with the site. Through immersive engagement and collective vocalization, participants reflect on the forest’s vulnerability, resilience, and regenerative capacity, developing more grounded and sensitive perspectives for future repair and conservation strategies.
Tracing the Dyriads integrates sensorial exploration, dialogue, and vocal expression to transform conventional environmental thinking. Instead of approaching the forest as an object of management, participants encounter it as an ecological presence with its own rhythm, texture, and timbre. Vocalization becomes an extension of spatial experience, allowing participants to respond to the forest’s atmosphere through sound. Dialogue supports this process by creating space for shared reflection and reinterpretation. By merging embodied perception with collective artistic expression, the program reframes ecological decision-making as a relational and affective practice, opening new ways to understand damaged landscapes and imagine repair.
The program unfolds in four interconnected phases. In Sensory Activation, participants engage in a quiet forest expedition, experiencing the site through attentive listening, observation, and bodily awareness. During Dialogue Creation, they establish shared meanings through collective sensory and sound-based exchange with the forest system. In the Search for New Expressions phase, participants explore musical forms that articulate their spatial experiences and emotional responses. Finally, in Co-performance, they generate improvised vocal performances under the guidance of a professional choir conductor, capturing both individual and collective reflections on the forest’s ecological significance. Through this layered process, the forest is not only observed but encountered, listened to, and reimagined as a living system demanding care, responsibility, and renewed forms of ecological thinking.
Main Goal
In the Footsteps of Dyrads explores a forest area, assessing its sensory and emotional significance while addressing damage sustained along the Aegean coast in 2020 and 2021. It recognizes the forest as a living entity, shaped by natural and social interactions among all organisms, including humans. Through an immersive setting, participants engage with these encounters, form connections, and express their insights through collective vocalization.
Art Interfaces
Improvised music making.
Place/s
Pamucak, near Kuşadası, is a sensitive coastal plain where dunes, wetlands, and forests form a single ecological system that stabilizes soils, moderates climate, and sustains biodiversity under development pressure. The forests are essential for natural infrastructure as they regulate microclimates, protect the coastline, and support habitat continuity. This ecological lens shifts planning from short-term use toward long-term landscape stewardship.
Story
When large ecosystems like forests are damaged by natural disasters, the human mind often reacts in a purely rational and functional way. These areas are typically reduced to a mere color on a map, while the rich, interconnected life within them is rarely part of the conversation. However, forests are dynamic living systems, continuously regenerating and sustaining the larger global ecosystem.
The program integrated sensorial experience, dialogue and vocalization to inspire future planners to rethink and reimagine forests, not just as spaces in need of management, but as vibrant, interconnected environments that demand deeper understanding, care, and engagement. Participants were invited to experiencing the being of a forest that calls an ecological perspective when decisions have to be made for such land.
Vocalization becomes part of a spatial experience and dialogue supports that by allowing opportunities to emerge through which participants create new ways to see and reflect about the understanding of forests and developing repair strategies, particularly with a consideration of damage occurring due in different forest areas