HUMAN LANDSCAPES - LANDSCAPES MAPPED WITH STORIES
I was born in a village in the Aegean Region of Turkey, not so far away from where Homer says The War of Troy happened. I grew up chasing chickens - only to pat them - and listening to my grandma`s tales filled with the most intelligent animals and the most awkward human beings.
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Listening to her stories was one of the greatest privileges I had as a child. In time, I have dug out more meaning from the rich soil of her stories. I started to see history, social life, and religion buried, or disguised in those awkward characters and the way they moved about the world, say, a mad woman who hired frogs to spin the yarn or a man who tried to trap sunlight in a pot and bring it into his living room to dry vegetables for winter.
In the summer of 2012, returning from the US on holiday, I travelled through Aegean villages to hunt more such stories. “My life would make a novel,” many elders said, when I asked them to tell me a story. I listened and recorded tales about personal, political and natural events such as, elections, the death of a lover, or a flood, that the storytellers comfortably mingled with legends, folktales and fairytales. It wasn’t that easy to chronicle “life” without a touch of the inexplicable.
And thus was born my Human Landscapes Story Telling Project, which I am hoping to extend beyond Aegean Turkey through an online story telling platform. While the project seems like mine, it is through a lot of discussion, encouragement, and help from Elliot. I also would like to extend many thanks to Meltem Turkoz for offering generous, mind-blowing,energezing advice since I started collecting stories, Zeynep Özel for designing the rooster and wallpapers for this website, Moon and Stars Organization of New York for recognizing this project by offering a fellowship in 2013 and my friends and family who crowd-funded the most recent leg of my story-collecting in Turkey, in March, 2018.
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Translations and mapping take a lot more time than I imagined, but the map for story-navigation is now on and available!!! (see below). :) Stay tuned for updates and please visit other pages on this website to see my other stories and illustrations, photos and videos and blog.
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Thank you all for all the support and all the stories!
Münire
link for the map: https://arcg.is/1rDfvL
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