How can we be nourished by a land full of trauma?
How can we nourish a land full of trauma?
Yunan dölü, Tουρκόσποροι — how to converse with bitter roots?

On Lost Love and Lost Land (LLLL) explores the place-based memory of populations exchanged between the island of Crete and the İzmir region during the fall of Ottoman rule and the end of the Greko-Turkish war (1922). The project traces migration, and land stewardship through the foraging, preparation, and transmission of the edible wild bulb Muscaria Comosum (morbaş, ασκορδουλάκοι) and other wild weeds. It follows the foragers' relationships with the land they inhabit and the land they left behind, weaving together oral histories, family archives, and bittersweet recipes. The work reflects on how love for land is lost, relearned, and carried across generations, moving beyond national narratives, foregrounding shared trauma, cultural continuity, and common ground between the people of both sides of the Aegean sea.

LLLL was part of the exhibition The Foragers: Engagements Beyond the Human, Pilar Brussels, VUB Crosstalks, Brussels, 23 April– 29 May 2026, curated by Gosie Vervloessem.
Supported by Citylab Pianofabriek
In collaboration with trampkitchen, tibiaxfibula and zeytinokulu
In dialogue with Cansu Pelin İşbilen, Fatih Gençkal, Demetrios Navras, Afroditi Anastopoulou, Hazal Arda, Tuğba Yaşar, Nagehan Uskan, Anna Tzakou, Nina Alexandraki
part of the "Embodied Documentary Filmmaking: Embodied Ecologies" workshop, Imprint documentaries Collective