Threshold

This project traces embodied knowledge carried by my grandmother, who cannot read or write. Through gestures and ritual, she sustains an unwritten culture. Threshold reflects a space between oral memory and visual record.

This project looks at one of the last witnesses of an unwritten culture.

It focuses on embodied knowledge — practices transmitted through repetition, observation, and memory rather than through text.

My grandmother cannot read or write. She has never engaged with photography as a medium. Yet the knowledge she carries is precise, structured, and enduring. Through gestures, rhythm, and daily rituals, she sustains a cultural language that has never been formally documented.

The act of preparing food becomes more than a domestic routine; it becomes a site of transmission. The recipe is not written. The measurements are not fixed. The knowledge lives in the hands.

While photographing her, I slowly became aware of another layer of exchange. She observes me with the same attentiveness with which she folds dough. Without fully understanding the camera, she acknowledges the act of recording. Her silent approval becomes part of the work.

“Eşik” (Threshold) reflects on a transitional space: between oral and visual memory, between disappearance and continuity, between inherited knowledge and contemporary documentation.

The series does not attempt to preserve tradition as nostalgia. Instead, it asks how undocumented cultural practices survive, shift, and find new forms of visibility.

It is both an archive and a crossing.