Ayşegül Dinççağ Kahveci: Reclaiming Localities on Imbros: Heritage-making as an Act of Resistance

Imbros (today Gökçeada, Turkey) is a North Aegean Island that stands a contested site of heritage-making shaped by the broader tensions of Greek-Turkish power structures. Throughout the 20th century, state-driven national policies led to the displacement of the island’s Greek inhabitants, forcing them to abandon their lands and properties. Since the early 2000s, an increasing number of Imbrians from the diaspora have been returning and resettling on the island.

This lecture explores the phenomenon of Imbrian return and their engagement with the built environment. Based on a decade-long ethnographic field research (2012–2023), the study examines heritage-making as an act of resistance through the reconstruction of homes by seasonal and permanent returnees. By focusing on material culture and local architecture, the research examines and showcases the heritage practices of returnees in their family houses, as well as their strategies for restoring damaged traditional homes. In doing so, it challenges the notion of local architecture as a fixed heritage object and instead foregrounds a critical approach to locality as a relational and processual phenomenon, much like heritage itself. Through this perspective, the study demonstrates how acts of rebuilding not only reclaim physical spaces but also contest dominant narratives of displacement and erasure, reconfiguring locality as an ongoing processes of identity, belonging, and resistance.

Ayşegül Dinççağ Kahveci is a Berlin-based architect, urban planner, and researcher. She studied architecture at Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) from 2004 to 2010. She has worked in Istanbul, Berlin, and New York, contributing to urban transformation and participatory planning projects in Turkey (2010–2012). Since 2014, she has been a member of the Berlin Chamber of Architects and practices as a freelance architect.

In 2016, she completed the School of Design Thinking program at the Hasso Plattner Institute. From 2019 to 2023, she was part of the DFG Research Training Group “Identity and Heritage” at TU Berlin, completing her PhD at UdK Berlin.

Her research lies at the intersection of architecture, urban studies, ethnography, anthropology, and heritage studies, applying transdisciplinary approaches to space, memory, and material culture. Currently, she is a founding member and researcher at TAM Museum. 

TU Berlin
Str. des 17. Juni 152
Raum 815, Architekturgebäude
Beginn: 18.30