In the Ecotone series; the body becomes part of a living landscape—blurring the lines between skin, soil, and sunlight. Rather than staging nature, the image invites a tactile coexistence with it.

Ecotone

The Body as Borderland

Burak Bulut Yıldırım’s Ecotone series positions the nude body as a threshold—oscillating between nature and culture, never fixed, always becoming.
Shot over 15 years across diverse climatic zones, these images refuse to cast the body as the subject of pastoral nostalgia. Instead, it emerges as a companion to light, soil, water, and wind—a sentient surface rather than a symbol.
Here, nudity is not a representation but a tactile encounter—with gravity, humidity, chlorophyll.
From Courbet’s The Origin of the World to Weston’s sculptural torsos, from ancient Aphrodites to contemporary ecofeminist gestures, the series resonates with art historical echoes without being confined by them.
Yıldırım’s compositions decentralize the human figure; attention shifts to the bend of a tree, the surface of a stone, or the breath of mist.
This is not landscape as background, but as co-existence—an atmosphere where skin and weather collaborate.
In some frames, clarity dissolves into blur, inviting the viewer into a sensory suspension rather than a narrative resolution.
The project has already appeared in two prior exhibitions: Landsnude (Greece, 2015), developed collaboratively with five of Yıldırım’s students; and Only You Are Close, When Everything Is Far Away, conceived during the pandemic as a gesture of ecological longing.
Rather than idealizing the nude, Ecotone celebrates the sweating, rain-soaked, soil-smeared body—placing epidermis and ecosystem in a shared choreography.
It does not attempt to represent nature, but to breathe with it—rendering the body as a site of passage, an organic map of belonging.