EZGI SONMEZ | WEBSITE | C-BEYOND | INSTAGRAM | RETURN TO TIMES
Ezgi Sonmez is an artist, researcher, and founder & director of C-BEYOND Research. Ezgi’s passion in life is diving into the intersectionality of art, science, and humanities to collect qualitative findings on authentic ways of living with the awareness of death. As an anthropologist, she enjoys exploring the depths of people’s stories, as well as her own story, to express what makes us human - as the living and the dying one at the same time. Her field of interest also includes the concept of time (and the subjective experience) of temporality, historicity, and transcendence which often takes the form of ethnographic photography, hybrid documentary filmmaking, and performative practices in her work.
Below are three pieces, presented as scanned pages from a document Sonmez calls a ‘research book’ that was created during her MSc studies at UCL to unveil multiple narrative possibilities through a practical exploration of a personal story. The whole work was formed as a handmade collage of cut-out images, self-searching poems, openly-shared diary pages, and collected script-writing ideas over a one year period to find the voice of an artistic expression which eventually gave birth to Sonmez’s auto-ethnographic film, Memento Mori - currently exhibited at the VR exhibition of Multimedia Anthropology Lab: Multimedia Encounters.
A Photo Storyteller: Words Behind the Frames
A Bilingual Poem in Pursuit of Finding the Lost Meaning in Translation
Another Way of Remembering: Sevgi
“This piece of art is the first door opened to the outside world about my own grief experience that has evolved into ethnographic research by wanting to be loud about mortality awareness, interviewing with strangers on the streets of London about the stories of loss, and finding value in this exploration as an act of service for interpersonal healing as well as the personal. It is accompanied by a reflexive log, field notes, and observations on the first anniversary of my mother's death; and crowned by the multimedia form where we see my participants' faces after sharing our deeply-repressed vulnerabilities and hear their voices saying my mother's name in the way they were touched by: 'Sevgi' - meaning Love! This work is the symbol of the only two things we cannot escape feeling in this world, loving someone and losing someone; and, is the ultimate send-and-receive act of my life.''