Places and Memoirs
Place-based works traveling in thought-speed between Los Angeles, Istanbul, and other stops.
My American Dream
“With thinning came an expansion of my identity toward every piece of land one could be from on this Earth. A sense of being held by and caring for people from all over the world.”
A fistful of beans, enough for a meal.
On my mother’s relentless frugality which makes her life harder, but the world a better place.
People often assume I am well-traveled.
I am not.
I did take the toughest journey a body and mind can handle though: I immigrated. Layers and layers of my identity peeled off. New skin grew over it. Every trip between my birth home and my found home is a rite of passage.
To be well-traveled, you need to be sure of where you want to come home.
Someone says that it takes seven years to learn what it means to live in New Orleans. Some people talk about how rats come out before dawn. Someone comments “creativity bubbles out of the grime.” Graveyards are set above ground, is that why? The whole town sites below sea level, a collectively persistent attachment to perpetual geological doom, une belle melancolie, this is how New Orleans appears to me, I get to judge and build illusions as a passer-by…
Read / Listen.
The public space is for dreamers, shine in eyes, and rising stars.
This is why L.A. must insist on staying an affordable and low-rise city. You must always be able to gaze into infinite skies or faraway hills that fold towards you on a clear day. Maddening forces operating from under the ground must be pressed out by the Sun.
Video poetry scoping the lives of pigeons in Los Angeles.
I captured the footage between 2012 and 2019, at the Sunset + Crescent Heights intersection of my neighborhood. Birds' behavior echoes human migrations, hinting at my climate anxiety, materialized by the architectural transformations in my city.
Climate reality is in black and white.
The psychology of it, not quite.
With motherhood, my climate emotions took a new shade of real.
“I do serendipitous reading lately,”
said Talia as she walked into her kitchen leaving me alone in her library filled with books in depth psychology, and healing arts. My mouth watered. I hope I secretly took some pictures of her shelves. (I do that a lot. It’s the only kind of theft I can be accused of.) If I did, I can track the date I visited her place in our text messages, find the photo in my archives, zoom into the first book that draws my attention, reserve it on the library app, and wait for it to become unlocked for me.
I care less about the outcome, or how my brand is perceived. More about the integrity of my process with my ideologies. This is why a lot of my art is invisible or disappearing because it’s not just me making stuff to look at and for a collector to buy, but it’s me practicing how to become more resilient on a Planet in crisis mode.