Gökçen Erkılıç is an architect, cartographer and video maker. Her works use mapping, video art, and cartographic history to investigate new methods of research in urban studies. She is focusing on political ecologies to articulate border conditions, material flows, and marginal narratives among humans and environment. Her mapping project “Coastline Atlas” charts infrastructures of land and water at contested waterscapes in the metropolitan region of Istanbul and its environs. In the broader context, she is working on mapping histories of Anatolia. Her video work This is not a line: Coastline as ecotone in Istanbul: flatland / landfill / whirlpool was exhibited in various exhibitions and events. Her latest article (2021) is entitled “For Thousands of Years, Waters Delineated the Destiny of This City and Its People”: A Material Cartography of the Coastlines and the Shaping of Istanbul’s Port Geography.
She is currently a visiting researcher at Harvard University, Center for Middle Eastern Studies. She teaches at Northeastern University College of Arts Media and Design. She graduated from Middle East Technical University Department of Architecture (2010), holds a master degree from Istanbul Bilgi University (2012) and was a fellow in Istanbul Studies Center (2017). Her doctoral dissertation at Istanbul Technical University, was entitled “This is not a line”: Critical Delineation of the Coastline in Istanbul” (2019).
