The City Already Has a Pulse

Eylül Aslan’s argument is simple and her photographs back it up: the city is already a living organism, and we’ve mostly stopped paying attention to it. Working from a brief about urban farming and the future of food, the Turkish photographer produced images that let human bodies bleed into plant life—skin into root, breath into soil—a visual merging that makes the boundary between urban dweller and urban environment feel genuinely porous.

Her proposition is that cities don’t lack for sound or vibration. The collective pulse of millions of people packed into concrete—heartbeats, digestion, footfall, the low-frequency groan of subway tunnels—already constitutes a kind of music. Whether plants grow toward or away from that is almost beside the point. The work trusts you to feel what it’s arguing rather than read it off a label.

Aslan contributed alongside photographers Adrià Cañameras, Mariana Garcia, and Laurie Kang, each approaching urban ecology from a different angle. Her work is the most interior of the group—less about infrastructure, more about the body as the city’s smallest unit.