Did They Erase Maraş?

Did They Erase Maraş? offers a surface-memorial response to the earthquakes of February 6 in Kahramanmaraş.

From a shard that resembles broken concrete, a half-formed, sleeping face emerges; crack lines map fault lines, while protruding wires recall rebar. The stitches read both as wound and as suture, holding a tension between mourning and resilience.

The accompanying video/sound layer collages demolition, sirens and alarms with excerpts from public rhetoric that contradicts itself, and fragments of a voice message said to be sent by a young girl to her father from under the rubble. The collapse of communications—messages arriving days later—comes under scrutiny together with the weight of tens of thousands of lives lost amid delayed response.

The work counters the speed of forgetting with the slow insistence of the hand, turning the face it bears into an object of witness and remembrance.