Cultural Crossings at the Threshold
Liana Kuyumcuyan is a social designer working at the intersection of public space, everyday urban practices, and spatial justice.
She studied Industrial Design (BA) at Istanbul Bilgi University and Social Design (MA) at Design Academy Eindhoven. She graduated with Architecture and Urban Studies (MA) at Istanbul Kadir Has University with her thesis called "Micro-publics: Sitting outdoors as a resilient practice in a transforming city". She is a doctoral candidate at the National Technical University of Athens in the department of Architectural Language, Communication, and Design, with her thesis called "A comparative study on micro-publics: Sitting outdoors in Istanbul, Athens and Naples".
Her work, "The Absent Speaker’s Corner," was exhibited during Milan Design Week 2024 at BASE Milano, Italy. Her work "Remnants of a Dialogue" will be exhibited during the 4th Larnaca Biennale, Cyprus, in October-November 2025; and the placemaking project she made for the project "Futures of Listening" will be exhibited at Museum MACAN, Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, Indonesia, in December 2025.
She designed exhibitions for the old British Post Office in Istanbul with Murat Tülek, called "Postane: Archeology of a Building" (2023), and Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s Istanbul Office, called "Heinrich Böll Stiftung Istanbul & 30 Years of Civil Society and Politics in Turkey" (2024).
She wrote a book about the old British Post Office in Istanbul with Murat Tülek, called "Postane: Archeology of a Building" (2024). She co-edited Dragomanen’s "Pedestrian Modernities" issue (2025). She was the executive editor of "Design Unlimited" magazine (2019-2024). She was the guest editor of beyond.istanbul's "Spatial Justice and Beyoğlu" issue (2020).
This project investigates the everyday practice of sitting outdoors as a resilient urban behavior that shapes informal micro-public spaces in diverse cultural, religious, and geographic contexts. Originally developed as a comparative study of Istanbul, Athens, and Naples, it explores how thresholds become sites of social interaction, cultural expression, and subtle resistance amid modernization and transformation. This research was initiated through personal observations in rapidly transforming neighborhoods, where a simple act of sitting became a layered gesture of resistance, visibility, and communal continuity, reflecting on agency, everyday resilience, and cultural dialogue. These micro-publics emerge as porous, flexible, and transient spaces that disrupt rigid distinctions between public and private life, embodying spatial resilience and community belonging. Through fieldwork, informal interviews, historical mapping, and architectural analysis, the project uncovers the dynamic interplay between ritual, morphology, and daily practices. Building on this foundation, the project proposes a participatory workshop series and exhibition that engages communities to create installations based on their understandings of thresholds, expanding the research into lived practices and collective storytelling. These outputs foster community engagement, promote spatial activism, and open cross-cultural dialogue. The flexible format allows replication in different cities, aiming for small-scale collaborations across member institutions. The long-term vision is to develop this into a collaborative research platform connecting urban thinkers, designers, local actors, and institutions around inquiries of informal spatial production and embodied resistance. Future phases could include a publication compiling participant work and theoretical essays, site-specific installations or interventions in collaboration with LINA members, and a traveling version of the workshop and exhibition.