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it flies, invisible 2019

In 2018, I travelled to Turkey to find out more about my family history. I met my mother’s siblings and their families for the first time. I was curious about the place where my mother was born and to see what life she could have had if she wasn’t adopted by her aunt, who became her mother and my grandmother. It was a gesture of love between the two sisters as my grandmother was not able to have children of her own. I visited Girmeç, a small village in the countryside near Ankara, and saw the ruins of the house in which my mother was born and ceremoniously handed over as a newborn. 

Later, when my mother moved to Germany, the distance widened between her and her birth family. When she found out as a teenager that she was separated from her birth parents and siblings, the reality of her life changed. In recent years, I’ve realised how little I actually know about my mother’s past, what shaped her to be the person she is today and furthermore how I inherit this unknown past which is part of me, my identity. Bridging these gaps and building my own understanding of the past involves tracing what was absent from it. To reveal this, opens a space for new beginnings. 

Arriving there, I felt like a stranger in a world that I would never be able to unveil or fully understand. While, at the same time, everything felt so familiar, as if I had been there before. 

As a Photo Book (your can take a look at it here) 

80 pages, 19 x 26 cm, first edition of 50, self-published

The book contains two realities that coexist. The first half shows more of the present with two portraits of each person and people in landscapes that look and move out of the picture frame. The stones and the portraits are the same size and small next to the full frame landscapes that are attached next to each other, forming one continuing landscape. The cuts of the landscapes depict on what is not visible, what is absent but still present. It is my presence where I analytically try to get closer to my origins. 

The backs of old photographs open up a different, parallel reality in which the present mingles with the past and the future. Picturesque and abstract landscapes alongside photographs from the past and youth, as well as the inverted images of stones reminiscent of meteorites in the universe, emphasise the coexistence and reverberation of time. Their past becomes my presence and simultaneously symbolises a new beginning. 

The feeling of strangeness and the inability to fully uncover the past lies in the alienation and abstraction of visually perceptible reality.

The photo book is designed as a collage as it brings together different media, such as analog and digital, new and old, and documentary and abstract images.