Sven Christian [SC]: What planted the idea to make a fog collector?

Ebru Kurbak [EK]: I was teaching a course called “Politics of Making”. While preparing my lectures I was researching how textiles have been used in relation to ecological elements, and the idea of collecting fog came up. I looked into it and found out that it has been a developing practice along the South American coast.
I wanted to test it, but I never came around to it and the idea got lost. When preparing for the residency at NIROX, my research took several directions. One was about the underground. Everything that comes from underground here — hominid fossils, gold, other precious materials — is valuable. At the same time, I wanted to know more about NIROX. Through a Google search I came across some photographs by David Lurie, from a series called Daylight Ghosts (2019), which shows the fog above the dams. Seeing those photographs brought back that buried idea.

SC: How did these two interests — fog and gold — merge?

EK: Last year, when I visited South Africa, I saw this really interesting exhibition about African gold at Javett UP, and had worked with gold threads and embroidery in a previous project, so everything gravitated towards trying to use this material to collect fog. The transient value of materials and knowledges is important to my work. I’m really interested in how, for example, with time or migration, some skills might become obsolete. If you migrate to a different country, a different circumstance, you may find that your skills are no longer valid. I made a project about this in 2015 called Infrequently Asked Questions (2015–16).

As a material, gold is very interesting. It’s a good electrical conductor, for instance. This is why it’s very valuable in the tech industry today. It’s rare, and for this reason, has been valuable as an exchange material. It is also shiny and visually appealing... It seems from the exhibition at Javett UP that this was probably why gold was also valuable in prehistory. Values of things change depending on perspectives and the circumstances of the time
and place. We know that in the future, the value of clean water is going to continue to increase. Right now we take water for granted in some parts of the world, but soon we will not be able to. I was thinking about the relationships between these materials and their relative values.

SC: Can you talk more about the relationship between textile and technology?

EK: Yes. I run an artistic research project called The Museum of Lost Technology. Here, the word lost means more like ‘missed’ — ‘missed opportunities’, in a way, because textiles are common in our everyday, and so we don’t normally see them as technology, but they do involve a certain way of making. Working with a thread is different from working with, say, mud. It’s just a different making method. No more, no less. But because of their relationship to indigenous, nomadic, and women’s cultures, textile-making was considered a lesser skill within modernity and the capitalist post-industrial society. People still don’t see it as a very important skill, but it was one of the first technologies.

The spindle, which is used to make workable threads from weak fibres, is the oldest rotating technology on earth. It was invented before the wheel, so it’s actually one of the most prominent technologies in history. I’m looking at it in that way, seeing it as a making method, and also a metaphor for thinking, because if you’re thinking with building blocks you’re occupying a different metaphoric space than if you’re thinking with threads.

My assumption is that science and technology research practices were built lacking this knowledge, because the people who were involved weren’t actively working with such material. They might have used material metaphors in their thinking, but some technologies might have been ‘missed’ because of the segregation of knowledges.

I see my research as being comprised of two types of artistic outputs. On the one hand I usually come up with a device, a technology, or something — like this fog collector — but I also see this research in-and-of-itself as performative; an intervention or missed act, let’s say.

SC: Yesterday you spoke about the utilitarian function of these largescale fog collectors in Chile and Peru — that the technology is already out there, so it doesn’t seem like you’re looking to invent something. Would you mind speaking about the relationship between the poetic, metaphoric, and utilitarian? The thought-space that you want your work to occupy?

EK: Yes, it’s in this space where there is proof of concept — there is something “working”, so to speak — but that working aspect aims to also provoke a thought space for audiences beyond utilitarian benefit. It does somewhat align with speculative design practices, but to me it is also important to go into actual research spaces and make things that actually work, here and now.

That’s where it is different to a speculative scenario in the distant future. On the other hand, I’m obviously not trying to invent the best fog collector for the industry. That is someone else’s task. I’m hoping to address a space in-between material and thought.

SC: It’s been interesting to observe your process, and how exacting you are. Because even though you’re not looking to engineer, there’s a level of consistency and precision that makes your work feel like a science experiment — the studio as laboratory. Having all these parameters set up seems to give you more manoeuvrability, when it comes to the poetic.

EK: Yes! It’s an anchor. It organises everything around it.

SC: And cognitively, it makes it sit in a way that eleviates that dismissive aspect... Like, ‘this is just theory!’ You know what I mean?

EK: Exactly. In science fiction, there is this concept of cognitive estrangement proposed by Darko Suvin. So when you’re in a science fiction space and you see a prop or something, it might create a sense of estrangement, that we are not in the real world; we are

not in our world “as it is.” This can enable us to start imagining a different world. But if you make a science fiction film that doesn’t build on anything that we already know, then the audience wouldn’t understand anything. You need to have both, the strange and the familiar. Commenting on these types of works, including my own, Bruce Sterling, the science fiction writer, said they do something similar — they reorganise our ideas about the world. That was really important for me to hear.

SC: I like that a lot, and your use of the word ‘anchor’. I feel that when I engage your process too, just on a very physical level. For example, your process of weaving is about finding a point at which you have intersecting paths that hold each other.

EK: Yes, that way of thinking probably comes from my design education. I have a background in architectural design, so I see many small, design problems throughout my work. Some artists dance, some paint. I use design methodologies — with artistic intent. It could be the design of relationships between people, an experiment, or an object, but it’s usually about the organisation of things in relation to each other.

SC: In the studio now there are a number of different samples. I guess your anchor there is your square ratio, 1:1, whether that’s scaled down to 10 x 10 centimetres or up to 1 x 1 metre. But within those parameters you’ve experimented with different techniques.

EK: Yes. It‘s not a scientific environment at all, but I did create my samples the same size and use the indoor vaporiser, over two hours, to watch how each one behaved — not only the amount of water they collected but how the drops developed on the surface; how smaller drops pooled together to become larger drops; and how that specific sample allowed drainage. I learned from each sample. You need a porous surface. The sample needs to have holes so that the fog can go through it. If it’s too dense, the fog won’t go through; it will go around the surface. If it goes through, the holes shouldn’t be too big, otherwise you can’t capture water droplets. If they’re too small they can get clogged. When they’re clogged you can’t collect any more droplets, so there should also be vertical elements that drain the water into a container.

I experimented with different textile methods. I brought these old anthologies with me about textile-making practices. Some techniques I’m familiar with. Others I taught myself. I tried crochet, knitting, embroidery lace and different ways of making net-like structures, and thought about how that could be produced on a larger scale. That was an important factor in my designs — is this producible on a larger scale?

It’s difficult to grasp how water or fog will behave. At times I thought I designed something effective and then it didn’t work the way that I had intended, so it really needs a lot of experimentation.

SC: Is there something about the transformation of matter — solid, liquid, gas — that you find captivating?

EK: It is very exciting to watch. That’s really what I mean by seeing something “work.” Seeing something happen. That is very exciting, because the way I look at my own work then becomes different. First, before I try anything, it’s just an idea. I am not even sure if

I personally believe in it. Then, once I get it to work, there is a breaking point where my own perception of that material reality changes. The more I work with it, the more ordinary it becomes. Through that process, it goes from being this fascinating, strange idea to something quite normal. I like that transformation. I can imagine the audience going through that process with me — seeing it work for the first time and coming to that realisation. You see fog, in the form of fog, and you see small droplets appearing out of nowhere, on the gold structure. It is impressive to watch.

SC: Earlier you spoke about something becoming background information; everyday technologies that we take for granted, but which shape our thinking. Now we’re talking about that“Aha!” moment, and the point where it no longer feels magical, or at least, that that magic has become commonplace. How much of it is about keeping that sense of curiosity or magic alive?

EK: In the work, you mean?

SC: Or even for yourself, in the making process? Both?

EK: What you’re saying reminds me of an irony I see in my larger practice. I often work with marginalised knowledges and bring them into the art and technology space because they are usually excluded. My drive is to somehow keep doing this, until it’s no longer unusual to see these knowledges in these contexts.
But ironically, sometimes I think, as soon as I achieve this goal, the works will also become commonplace. It feels strange to work in a direction that will destroy the perception of my own work, but I want to intervene.

SC: Yesterday we spoke about the possibility of the water that forms dripping straight back into the dam; not being collected. I like that, in a way. To go full circle.

EK: Exactly, yes.

SC: Sci-fi is something I wanted to talk more about — the need for sci-fi to be rooted in the real, to have that cognitive estrangement. What you were saying reminded me of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and the way they harvest water, but there’s also a connection there to imperialism, the hoarding of finite resources, how they’re valued, indigenous knowledge systems, and so on.

EK: Yes, I need to reread that book.

SC: Is sci-fi something you grew up with, though?

EK: Of course, but I think the interest stems more from my architecture studies, which was very experimental. We had utopia projects and stuff. There was a lot of world-making and inventing for worlds that do not exist. Of course, it depended on which professor one picked, but mine found it more interesting to work for an unreal situation, or rather, a situation that has its own reality, where you have to invent a circumstance and then design for that circumstance. I really enjoyed it. I also remember working with textiles in two of the projects.

SC: The textile focus for you, from what I understand, is also rooted in the relevance and place of textiles in Turkey, right?

EK: Yes, but it’s more than that. Textiles for me represent the knowledge I brought with me, from my situated background. It is a skill that I have, simply because of my cultural identity. It had zero relevance in any of my formal studies, but I brought it into my work later because, even though it didn’t feel like it belonged, it was what I knew. I spent years learning these crafts because in the 1980s, when I was growing up, women in Turkey used to make decorative textiles for wedding dowries. Every girl had to have a dowry.

Also, my father is a textiles engineering professor. He would make drawings of close-up stitches. The drawings I made here actually come from what I learned from him as a child. He invented machines for industrial textile production. He looked at the mathematics of textiles. So there were these two cultures: one was very technical, and then there was the other, where women created decorative things that only interested them in their bubble. There’s a complex relationship between these two, somehow.