This project begins with the destruction of Antakya, the city where I was born and raised. After the earthquake, the city no longer exists in the same way, and the places that shaped my childhood have become distant, broken, or physically absent. Through personal video archives, I return to images of weddings, protests, streets, and fragments of collective life that now carry another meaning. These videos are no longer only records of the past. They become fragile remains of a city, a childhood, and a way of belonging that was interrupted. The lament accompanying the video is sung not only for a city that lost its life after the earthquake, but also for a childhood left behind with it. By working with this archive, I try to reconnect with a place that can no longer be reached in the same physical way. The images open a space between memory and loss, between what was lived and what has disappeared. Rather than reconstructing Antakya as it once was, the project explores how a city continues to exist through images, gestures, sounds, and personal memory. The archive becomes a way of approaching what is no longer physically there, and of giving form to a memory that has been displaced.
