CML in conversation with Pelin Tan × Yıldız Tahtacı × Ethel Baraona

Map of Threshold Infrastructure, Pelin Tan.

For the Spring Equinox Rehearsals thread, Helen Pritchard, Gabriela Aquije, and the MA Transversal Design host the workshop “Survival-with and Through: Rehearsing through entangled kinship” with critical practitioners Pelin Tan, Yıldız Tahtacı, and Ethel Baraona.

In this context, Gabriela will host an intimate conversation at the FoodCultureLab kitchen of HGK Basel on Thursday 26th of March, from 17h to 19h. The gathering is inspired by the nurturing everyday gestures in comadreria/camaraderie resistances, in the change-making lineages of Latin American comedores populares movements¹ and in the ‘Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press’². Together, we will learn from our interdependent experiences and imaginaries about food justice as a ‘collective survival strategy’³.

The conversation will revolve around three questions, reviewed and prompted within the “Nurturing Food Inter-structures” project:
What/why food? What/why sovereignty? What/why security? – and, of course, when and with whom?

We invite you, who read and care, to reflect on these questions and the ideas, stories, practices, dreams, struggles, and chismes that could emerge from them. The dialogue will be accompanied by homebrew kombucha and sweet-and-salty baked bites from “Agribella.” A Basel-based food collective that bakes as a political and mutual-aid strategy.

Welcome everybody—see you soon!

A self-organized, migrant women and non binary-led collective food infrastructures that emerged -and keep on emerging- during conflict periods in Latin America to feed and care for their neighborhood/communities. Check more of the Peruvian kitchens, through the research of Anna Puigjaner: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/overgrowth/221624/bringing-the-kitchen-out-of-the-house.
Herstory of the rebellious naming of this press, in the 1989 article of Barbara smith. Check: https://monoskop.org/images/7/76/Smith_Barbara_1989_A_Press_of_our_Own_Kitchen_Table_Women_of_Color_Press.pdf.
As referred in the “bursting bubble” dialogue between Ethel Baraona and Pelin Tan. Check: https://dpr-barcelona.com/survival-is-collective/.

Guests

Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian based in Mardin. She is the 6th recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism, NYC (2019). Currently, she is a Professor, Head of the Cinema Department at the Faculty of Fine Arts, and Head of the Cultural Studies master program at Batman University, Batman, Turkiye. She was an Associate Professor and Vice-Dean at the Faculty of Architecture at Mardin Artuklu University from 2013 to 2017. In 2016, she was a visiting Associate Professor at the PolyU School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and in 2020, a visiting fellow at the Bard College Human Rights Project and the Curatorial Studies Master Program. In 2024, she was a Visiting Professor at the German Orient Institute of Beirut, and the Media/Sociology Faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Tan was a senior research fellow at the Center for the Arts, Design and Social Research in Boston (2019–2024). She is a member of the Steering Research Network of the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal (2025–2027). She is on the curatorial board for IBA Stuttgart 2027. Editor of ipress, Cambridge. Co-curator of Urgent Pedagogies, urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se (IASPIS). Her research and documentary “Landscapes as Archives” on Palestinian spatial production and the Musa Alami Farm school in Jericho was supported by the Qattan Foundation (Ramallah). Her books: Forms of Non-Beloning, e-flux books/Sternberg press, 2026. Unconditional Hospitality: Threshold Architecture, dpr-barcelona, 2026.

Yıldız Tahtacı, an urban planner; completed her thesis “Spaces of Commons of Dispossessed Women: Women’s Laundry House of Benusen Neighborhood/ Diyarbakır and The Women’s Center/ The Square at the Fawwar Camp/West Bank (Palestine)” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Pelin Tan (Mardin Artuklu University – Architecture Faculty). Yildiz’s research trajectory focuses on the ecological feminist approach to architecture, urbanism, and spatial practices. Between 2013 and 2017, she worked at the Urban Planning Department of Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality. In 2017, she was dismissed from her job by the government; she won the court case and returned to her position in 2024. She was one of the project leaders of the Project of Matra “Replacement of displaced person: A new perspective of Social housing for Municipality” (a collaboration between Diyarbakır Municipality, Berlage Architecture Institution, and IHS, Erasmus University in Rotterdam).

Ethel Baraona Pohl (they/them) likes to smell books, they are a critic, writer and curator, as well as a co-founder of the independent research studio and publishing house dpr-barcelona, which operates in the fields of architecture, political theory, and the social milieu. Ethel is Senior Researcher at the Chair of Architecture and Care at ETH Zurich. Their curatorial practice includes, among others, “Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales” (Matadero Madrid, 2020–21); and also, “Llibres Model” a curated book collection and open library (Model, Barcelona Architectures Festival 2022, 2023). Their writing has been widely published, both in academic and independent publications. Ethel believes that publishing is a political act, and reading, a form of resistance.