Merve Bedir: Automated Landscapes - lecture at Gallery VI PER

Architecture and Cybernetics of the Factory as a Special Economic Zone
The Chinese Pearl River Delta region, the "world's factory" powered by humans, is gradually becoming one of the main areas transitioning to manufacturing systems based on the interaction of humans and robots. From automated kitchens and tailoring shops to agricultural fields, spatial arrangements, and protocols resulting from the automation of work, they confront conventional spatial requirements and normative rules regarding health, safety, and good living conditions. They bring about new forms of territorial occupation and competition, which lie beyond classical concepts of authorship and signature.
This presentation will focus on factories in the Pearl River Delta, showcasing research on (automated) forms of work in factories, their distribution and architecture, and the economics of the factory as a zone, as well as its governance. The presentation builds on ongoing research that is part of the Automated Landscapes program at Het Nieuwe Instituut and documents and reflects on the emerging architecture and urbanism of automated work in the Pearl River Delta, with a focus on current case studies in automated production, logistics, and supply chain infrastructure. Selected case studies illuminate potential new/future architectural typologies, such as new definitions of employment and labor, and the interactions between humans and machines.
Merve Bedir is an architect based in Rotterdam. Her research focuses on hospitality and mobility infrastructures. A second line of research explores relationships between humans and non-human entities in the context of ecology and cybernetics. She is a member of BAK in Utrecht and a lecturer at the School of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. She is also a co-founder of Aformal Academy (an experimental educational program in the Pearl River Delta region), a founding member of Mutfak مطبخ Workshop (focusing on the kitchen as a cultural space in Gaziantep, Turkey), and a founding member of the Center for Spatial Justice in Istanbul. Bedir earned her PhD from the Department of Architectural Engineering at Delft University of Technology and her bachelor's degree from Middle East Technical University in Ankara. She is a co-editor of the New Silk Roads series on e-flux architecture. She has published in Harvard Design Magazine, AD Magazine, and The Funambulist. Her work has received awards from the Prins Claus Foundation, European Cultural Foundation, and Europan and has been reviewed in The Guardian, Metropolis, and Avery Review. As a curator, she organized uncommon river (Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 2015), Vocabulary of Hospitality (Istanbul, 2015), and co-curated Automated Landscapes (Shenzhen, 2017 and 2019). Recently, her work Unsettled Urbanism was exhibited at Matadero Madrid (2020) and as part of the main exhibition of the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021). Another recent work, Floor Table (2022), will be presented at the Smithsonian Design Museum. She has also participated in biennials in Istanbul, São Paulo, Shenzhen, and Bucharest, as well as the triennale in Oslo.
Curator of the lecture series: Lukáš Likavčan