the earth we tread
Inci Nazlican Sagirbas
İnci Nazlıcan Sağırbaş is an architect who graduated from IZTECH, Turkey. She is currently studying at the Urban Design master's program at TU Berlin. She works as a student assistant at the Chair of ELAN (Landscape Architecture, TU Berlin) and at the Architectures of Asylum research project (Habitat Unit, TU Berlin). Her research focuses on land struggles from spatial and ecopolitical perspectives. She is interested in transnational solidarities across agrarian, guerrilla, and land movements, with a focus on informal practices of local and diasporic communities.
Marina Resende Santos is an artist and researcher. Her practice begins with eloquent sites — places where questions of land use, property, and ecology become legible — and unfolds through collaborative, site-responsive processes. She has performed and shown work internationally, with institutions such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial, Künstlerhaus Dortmund, and HAU (Berlin), and has been recognized with the Mart Stam Preis and the ImagéSanté Festival prize. Alongside her artistic work, she has taught at TU Berlin and Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, publishes and organizes programming on art and politics, and is a member of the Make-up project space in Berlin.
Together, through "the earth we tread" — funded by BUA and taught under Habitat Unit — they have been collaborating, drawing on their backgrounds in artistic and design research, to understand, debate, and map modes of relating to land not based on property, commodity exchange, and extraction. Working primarily in Berlin, the duo ran seminars over two semesters, combining walking with performative exercises, counter-mapping, and participatory observation, presented as installations, multimedia works, and performances alongside teaching formats and academic conferences. As part of the seminars, they edited, designed, and published the Land Glossary (presented above), gathering entries from participants and contributors worldwide through an open call.
When we hear "land," we might think of real estate, soil to farm, or landscapes to wander. It shapes our environments: national belonging, homes near and far, borders, and citizenship. But "land," bound to English as an imperfect lingua franca, carries untranslatable worlds: "terra," "toprak," "Boden" — nuances of home in exile, soil as fraternity, ground refusing reduction to square meters.
These disputed meanings reflect our complex relations with the grounds we live on — relations today's crises of environment and displacement call to restructure. Since 2025, the study group "the earth we tread" has mapped modes of relating to land beyond property, commodity exchange, and extraction, at the scale of everyday practices — spatial, designerly, artistic, and intimate.
This cross-sectional project has involved student-led seminars, performative exercises, guided walks, exhibition-making, and self-publishing — bridging academia by intervening in curricula while extending into self-organized spaces. Participants created multimodal works and published a Land Glossary, shared at a final gathering that deepened our understanding of "land" through local, rural, migrant, and neighborly perspectives. This glossary gathers a wide, wild range of everyday practices contesting normative relations to land — each contribution a scene of intimate yet communal practice, reshaping our relationship with the places we inhabit, from diasporic lives to native territories on a planetary scale.
We would like to bring this inquiry to LINA as a collective embodiment and writing practice: a workshop opening with a land exercise, an introduction to our approach and glossary-making, then a collective writing session where participants broaden it with their own lived practices, in languages that best describe them. We'd close by connecting our practices through counter-mapping. Repeatable with different participants, this workshop would prefigure the next steps of "the earth we tread."