Projeler · 11 fotoğraf
Unanchored
I’ve been missing something my whole life.
Not from last year. Not from five months ago.
From a time I can’t return to
or maybe one that never existed.
A constant nostalgia.
This looks like home.
It isn’t.
I think I know where I am.
I don’t.
Everything reminds me of it.
Not a place, not exactly.
More like a feeling that keeps repeating itself
in the wrong coordinates.
I’m not documenting where I’m from.
I’m documenting the mistake my body keeps making
recognising things that aren’t mine.
Loving a culture I also fear.
Grieving something I can’t name.
I imagine myself there sometimes
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen
eating breakfast with my mother,
not afraid of death,
certain I belong.
But I don’t know what for
I’m somewhere else now.
Home isn’t somewhere you return to.
It’s something you almost recognise.
Unanchored doesn’t have a geography.
It has sensations
the delay,
the fracture,
the almost.
Unanchored is an ongoing photographic project that began with a childhood fear of disappearance: the feeling that leaving a person or a place could slowly make you disappear from their world, or make them disappear from yours.
Growing up, I moved regularly between my parents’ homes, travelling alone from one city to another. Each departure meant leaving one world before fully arriving in another. What began as a childhood experience of moving between homes later extended into migration, carrying the same underlying sense of distance, absence, and uncertain belonging into a larger geography.
The project considers home not as a fixed place, but as something formed through memory, attachment, and repetition. It follows the traces of places and relationships that remain after departure, and the ways they continue to shape our sense of where we belong.
Memory becomes unstable in this space: places can become more familiar through absence, while somewhere entirely new can suddenly carry the sensation of something remembered.
Unanchored moves through the space between belonging and estrangement, presence and absence, departure and return. It is rooted in the experience of growing up between places, while extending toward a broader reflection on displacement and the persistence of memory.
At its centre is the possibility that home may exist less as somewhere we can return to than as something we continue to carry — sometimes consciously, sometimes through the body, and sometimes without knowing what we are carrying at all.
Ayvalık exists in a paradox: surrounded by the vast, open sea, yet carrying an inescapable sense of confinement. This tension is reflected in the generational divide: the older generation who never left, the younger who feel trapped but stay, and those, like me, who have left but remain tethered by memory and longing.
My mother’s choice to ground herself in Ayvalık has profoundly shaped this work. Her presence offered me the closest sense of rootedness I have known, even as the town’s contradictions mirrored my own unsettled life.
