Keklik
Since the Covid-19 Pandemic had broken out, I temporarily moved to my hometown which is a Mediterranean forest village: Nif-Fethiye/Turkey. In our neighbourhood, multigenerational family members live together.
My mother’s ethnic group is “Yörük” which means walkers. They are referred to as nomadic tribes of Turkmen origin who had emigrated from the steppes of central Asia to Anatolia. My mother’s nomadic grand-grandparents used to live in the tents. During the summer, they shepherd their goats to the mountain plateaus, where lower temperatures helped keep farm animals cool. When the autumn rain came and the grasses grew again, they headed to the coast. Though my close relatives have become fully sedentary now, they maintain the tradition of keeping a mountain house in the Nif Village for the summers and generally return to their Fethiye Coastline house in the winters. In this project, I wanted to document my Yörük aunties’ relationship between social organization and their summer house.
Bengisu Uykusu is based in Fethiye, Turkey.
Bengisu Uykusu is a multidisciplinary artist working in the fields of photography, video and sound-art. Since she is very curious about the universe, her current works explore cultural memory and the environment. As Socrates puts it in “The unexamined life is not worth living.“ Bengisu is a storyteller who designs the materials and vibrations that are extracted from the surrounding environment. She works for documentary video production companies and advertising agencies. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions and performances in China, Greece, Italy, Japan, Sweden and Turkey. For her, making art is a process of interacting with the cosmos.