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Paper short abstract

Letters From Elsewhere: A Fractured Space of Belonging is a visual project that explores lived tension between political resistance and emotional exile from Turkey. Built around first-person video letters, the project is a multimodal space to reflect on displacement, belonging, and memory.

Paper long abstract

In the summer of 2013, Istanbul witnessed the most powerful political uprisings in Turkey’s recent history - the Gezi Park protests. Started as an environmental sit-in, it soon turned into a nationwide movement against the Erdogan government’s increasingly authoritarian policies - eventually suppressed by the state through heavy policing, violence, mass arrests, and widespread censorship. With political and economic contexts worsened, democratic institutions weakened, and life more insecure, it is harder to speak out. In 2025, the sentencing of Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem İmamoglu sparked new protests.

Letters From Elsewhere is a visual ethnographic project developed in parallel with these events that emerges from and responds to the fractured sense of belonging. It is composed of first-person video testimonies recorded by young adults who left Turkey in recent years. Although not forcibly exiled, they find themselves suspended between places, identities, and belonging—often seen from the outside as privileged migrants, yet carrying feelings of guilt, helplessness, and unresolved longing. This study engages with questions of resistance, representation, and distance in multimodal anthropology. It offers a space of representation that centres the participants’ own narratives.

We explore how visual anthropology create meaningful spaces of representation that allow those caught between homes and identities to speak in their own voices. It further asks how resistance can be sustained across distance, time, and fractured emotional geographies. Finally, how might we understand resistance not just as a moment in the streets, but as a continuing and embodied practice of remembrance and defiance across time and space?