Immersive Storytelling and Digital Reconstruction as Performative Pedagogy in Reclaiming Ancient Urban Ecologies
Onur Birol

This proposal recreates the ancient city of Kibyra, in southwest Türkiye, as an affective pedagogical environment through an immersive storytelling installation built in a game engine. Drawing on excavation data, computer modelling, and projection mapping, the exhibit enables visitors to explore digitally restored public spaces and recover ecological imaginaries embedded in historic urban planning. It functions as a medium for sharing ecological and performative knowledge, aligned with the aim of using performative arts to rethink sustainable human subjectivities. Building on earlier work in digital heritage, architectural visualization, and cyclical narratives, the project advances participatory eco-pedagogies in CIRCUL’ARTs, inviting visitors to use the digital city as a platform for speculative stories from post-anthropocentric and decolonial perspectives. The installation supports the ambition to redefine performance as embodied, contextual, cyclical learning rooted in place-based storytelling, and to reconsider sustainability, heritage, and public space as overlapping, performative domains within urban ecologies.