Beykoz Kundura Vardiya IV, 20-26 Nisan 2026.

Archive, Space, and Narrative: Ecological Memory and Regimes of Maintenance at Beykoz Kundura 

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Developed during the Vardiya IV Research Residency at Beykoz Kundura, this project proposes inventory not as a method of cataloguing objects, but as a way of encountering an industrial landscape through its archival fragments, ecological processes,  material traces, and regimes of maintenance. Rather than treating the archive as a fixed repository of the past, the research understands it as an active field where documents, plants, surfaces, oral histories, and everyday spatial practices continuously generate new relationships and new readings of place. 

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This research evolved as a process-oriented investigation aimed at re-reading Beykoz Kundura through the interconnected lenses of archive, space, and narrative. From the outset, the central questions were concerned with what the archive reveals, what it continuously reproduces, what it leaves invisible, and how these archival narratives relate to the traces that remain visible across the site today. Beykoz Kundura was approached as a multilayered industrial heritage landscape shaped by its long history of production, the institutional legacy of the Sümerbank era, everyday life, labour relations, and its contemporary cultural transformation.

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Rather than understanding the site merely as a collection of preserved industrial structures, the research sought to investigate its continuities through archival documents, oral histories, maintenance practices, spontaneous vegetation, surfaces, voids, and recurring visual fragments. By spending time on site throughout the Shift programme and experiencing its daily rhythms firsthand, the research introduced another temporal layer into this ongoing narrative. Within this framework, Beykoz Kundura's transformation as an industrial heritage site was examined through the intersecting perspectives of ecological regeneration, archival memory, and adaptive cultural reuse.

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The first stage of the research focused on reading the exhibition The Memory of Kundura: A Whole World within a Factory alongside the public archive and extensive walks throughout the site. The exhibition is structured around the history of the factory, its production processes, and narratives of everyday life. Rather than separating industrial production from the social lives of its workers, it reveals the organic relationship between the two. Spaces including the nursery, dining hall, carpentry workshop, leather storage rooms, sheet metal warehouse, oil house, power plant, film production facilities, quay square, waterfront, and workers' housing were therefore examined not only through their historical functions but also in relation to the visual and oral fragments preserved within the archive.

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One of the first recurring themes emerging from both the archive and the exhibition was that of collective life. A significant portion of the visual material consists not of individual portraits but of group photographs, workshop scenes, strike and union demonstrations, childhood and nursery photographs, communal spaces, and everyday encounters. These recurring images suggest that the factory functioned not only as a site of production but also as a place where institutional belonging, welfare practices, care labour, and everyday relationships with the surrounding neighbourhood were continuously produced. The frequently repeated expression "the Sümerbank family" within oral history interviews reflects the powerful institutional rhetoric through which this collective identity was constructed.

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A second major theme concerns the inseparable relationship between production and everyday life. The factory emerges not simply as a workplace but as a lived environment where workers brought their children to the nursery, shared meals, spent time along the waterfront, participated in union organisations, received vocational education, and maintained family life. Within this context, the archive became an essential tool for tracing how patterns of spatial use transformed over time. The changing functions of the nursery building—which successively served as a retail store, infirmary, civil defence office, and archive—demonstrate how a single structure accumulated multiple layers of memory throughout its existence.

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Another recurring narrative centres on labour, craftsmanship, and the discourse of qualified production. Publications produced by Sümerbank consistently promote institutional values built around quality, continuity, discipline, education, and work ethics. Documents concerning vocational training programmes organised for the Singer Department reveal how young girls and workers' children were trained as skilled labourers, exposing the intertwined relationships between women's labour, child labour, education, and institutional production regimes. These archival materials demonstrate that industrial knowledge was transmitted not only through machinery and manufactured objects but equally through bodies, age groups, gendered divisions of labour, and educational programmes.