Eylül Aslan: Growing In The Pulse
Eylül Aslan made these photographs as part of some project about the future of cities and sustainable food, but what stuck with me was something she said about urban noise. Cities are already full of sound, she said—the pulse of traffic, the breathing of crowds, the rumbling in your gut when you’re hungry. That’s the music of the city. And maybe, she was suggesting, it’s not noise at all. Maybe it’s something plants can use.
I’ve always thought of cities as fundamentally opposed to growth—concrete against soil, walls against roots. We want to bring plants into cities as a kind of correction, like we’re apologizing for the buildings and asphalt. But Aslan’s observation cracks that open. There’s an intimacy in thinking that the sound of human presence, all our movement and need, could actually sustain the green things we’re trying to cultivate in impossible places. That the very noise we apologize for, the acoustic chaos of people living on top of each other, could be feeding the vegetables we’re trying to grow.
There’s something almost parasitic about it, in the most generous sense. The plants take what we throw at them—our vibrations, our heat, our hunger—and turn it into food. We can’t quiet ourselves down enough to not disturb anything; we’re too loud, too present, too needy. But maybe that’s not a failure. Maybe the plants don’t need us to disappear. They need exactly what we are.
Aslan’s photographs merge humans and plants in these unsettling compositions, and I think that’s the real point. Not that we can engineer some perfect symbiosis, not that music from a speaker will make tomatoes grow faster—though maybe it will, and that’s a whole other thing to sit with. But that we’re always already entangled with whatever we’re trying to grow, and the connection runs in both directions. We feed them our noise. They feed us.
There’s something oddly comforting about living in a city if you think of it that way. All the sound you’re making, all the pulse and rumble and hunger, isn’t wasted. It’s going somewhere. The plants are listening, if you want to believe that. Maybe they need us more than we want to admit. Maybe the problem was never that cities are too loud for anything to grow—it’s that we thought silence was a prerequisite for life.