Transcultural Geographies is an art and visual research project focusing on the transitory geographies of the Balkans, Turkey and the Caucasus. Immersing ourselves in sites stringing along the Southern axes that join Europe and the East, we examine dynamics of their economic and social transformation through a number of large-scale infrastructures and transcultural campaigns. In three distinct but interrelated research projects, we explore topographies that are increasingly marked by the transitions occurring in the post-socialist/post-Cold War period and we individually and collectively work to generate new audiovisual representations, geographic mappings and critical imaginings of the region.

The spaces of our studies are traversed and shaped by complex histories of migration. For the past several decades, Kurdish, Anatolian, Greek and Yugoslav migrants have come to work in Germany and other parts of Western Europe, and, they have moved in the reverse direction as well, returning to/though the Balkans for summer vacations and family visits. In the Caucasus, the old trails by which Central Asians arrive in Turkey and sometimes pass on to Western Europe are being revived as migrants seek opportunities in an expanding European economy. Transcultural Geographies explores these migration routes in relation to one another, considering their particularities and connectivities.

While migration is a major historical experience in this part of the world, we conceive of migration as merely one among many strands of interaction between regional and national spaces. For the purpose of this research, the movement of people is always read in connection with the flow of resources, information, images and capital. It is insufficient to say that migration takes place due to economic imbalances. We want to probe these correlations more deeply.

The installation of new wireless networks and satellite footprints, the repurposing of old interstate highways, and the construction of gigantic oil pipelines through these territories is symptomatic of broad transformations and global structural changes. Yet instead of feeling plugged in and participating in the world system, people in these regions often experience such transitions as a kind of disintegration. The politics involved in laying down highways, fiber cables, satellite links and oil pipelines across these territories suggests there these practices have a profound significance for local inhabitants as well as for the European Union. Superimposed upon the political and economic logics that determine these geographies lay the maps of memory, stories of evacuation and displacement, and of loss and recuperation. This project attempts to understand such subjective experiences in relation to the transnational infrastructures of the communication, energy and transportation sectors, which may divide as much as they connect. Our critical practice blends geopolitical thinking with the tissue of everyday life and tries to expose the transparent ways in which spaces are re-configured and people are re-positioned in the present world order.

A crucial aspect of the project is the audiovisual analysis of transnational infrastructures during moments of their transition - that is, in the midst of an oil pipeline's construction before it is buried and goes forever unnoticed, during a journey through a highway of brotherhood and unity after the breakup of Yugoslavia, or at the time when new wireless and satellite technologies are implemented to annex territories to European and global media space. In this sense, Transcultural Geographies is also fundamentally about problems of representation - whether an attempt to make large-scale and dispersed structures more visible, or to devise new forms of visualization and mapping, or to construct forms of narration that are interwoven with the possibilities of the media.

Themes running throughout the projects and the territories they critique include problems of representation, especially the challenge of making large scale infrastructures visible and less transparent, the narration of making the process of our own productions known-whtehr digital video editing or new cartographies..

These transnational projects in the communication, transportation and energy sectors are not only interwoven with migration histories, they are part of transitory and sometimes imperceptible processes that have enormous political and economic impacts and as such they demand audiovisual documentation and critical reflection. An oil pipeline is invisible once it is buried under the earth. A new wireless network cannot necessarily be seen. Gigantic new transnational construction projects in the transportation, communication and energy sectors, are symptoms of broad political, economic and cultural transformations and global structural change.

Transcultural Geographies includes three visual research projects:
The Black Sea Files, Timescapes, and Postwar Footprints.