Merve Bedir
Merve Bedir is an architect and researcher. She co-founded Mutfak مطبخ Workshop focusing on the kitchen as a cultural space in Gaziantep, Turkey; Aformal Academy, an experimental school program in Pearl River Delta region, China; and Center for Spatial Justice in Istanbul, Turkey. Merve has a PhD from Delft University of Technology, and her ongoing work examines infrastructures of hospitality and mobility. A second line of work follows the human and nonhuman relationships in the context of ecology and cybernetics. Her fellowship proposal focuses on the politics and practices of hospitality among communities in exile in the Netherlands, the kinds of spectral infrastructures they have created, and the way they have influenced society. In connection, she wants to research the spatial residue of hospitality and solidarity in urban and public space. Merve curated Uncommon River, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 2015; Vocabulary of Hospitality, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015; Automated Landscapes, Shenzhen, 2017 and 2019, China. Her work Floor Table will be part of Designing Peace exhibition, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, 2022. Recently, Unsettled Urbanism was exhibited in Matadero Madrid, 2020, and in the main exhibition of Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021. Merve wrote in Harvard Design Magazine (2019), AD Magazine (2019), The Funambulist (2018) among others and has forthcoming chapters in Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2021), Contentious Cities (Routledge, 2021), Architectures of Emergency (Taurus, 2021), and Public Space in a Chinese Megaregion (Routledge, 2021). She lives and works in the Netherlands, and is part of the BAK Cell, Utrecht, in the Fellowship for Situated Practice.