Ecotone

Where Skin Meets Soil

The body becomes landscape; the landscape becomes flesh. Ecotone dissolves the boundary between human and environment.

In ecology, an ecotone is the transitional zone where two ecosystems meet—forest edge meeting meadow, shoreline meeting lake. These are places of tension and exchange, where one world bleeds into another. For fifteen years, Burak Bulut Yıldırım has photographed the human body as its own ecotone: the site where flesh encounters earth, water, grass, and animal.

The figures in Ecotone do not pose in nature—they merge with it. The series explores thresholds: where skin ends and soil begins, where breath mingles with wind, where human presence dissolves into the organic world. The question is not whether the body belongs in nature, but whether any separation between them ever existed.

Donna Haraway’s concept of “natureculture” resonates here—the recognition that nature and culture are not opposites but deeply entangled. The nude body in landscape is never simply “natural”; it is always a cultural act, a frame. Ecotone holds this tension without resolving it. These are not earth goddesses or pastoral fantasies but bodies attending to what surrounds them: texture, temperature, the presence of other living things.

The series refuses the traditional hierarchy of figure over ground. The human form is neither dominant nor diminished—it is continuous with its environment. Animals, when they appear, are not props or symbols but fellow inhabitants sharing a moment of coexistence. The camera does not privilege the human; it observes an ecosystem in which the body is one element among many.

Ecotone has been in continuous development for fifteen years across Europe and the Mediterranean. Works were exhibited in Landsnude (Greece, 2015), and during the pandemic the sub-series Only You Are Close When Everything Is Far Away emerged. Selected works are available as limited edition archival prints through Artsper, Saatchi Art, and Artmajeur.