Synesthetic Accustomation
April 2026 – March 2027
HATAY
Born from the need to create a shared narrative between two siblings from Antakya after the February 6, 2023 earthquakes – one having directly experienced the devastation, the other having witnessed it from afar – this project is a sound and video-based production that approaches Antakya through the memory of place and auditory-visual testimony. One works in sound art, the other in video art, aiming to create a shared narrative space by bringing together their relationships with the place through auditory-visual layers. The displacement they experienced after the earthquake determined the production conditions of this work with Antakya and the need for re-engagement with the place.
The project addresses the systematic erosion of daily life, public spaces, nature, and human-space relationships in Antakya after the earthquake. This transformation is made visible not through a holistic disaster narrative, but through silences, interruptions, repetitions, gaps, and continuities. The study attempts to understand how extraordinary circumstances become commonplace in everyday life, the risk of the traces carried by places and bodies rapidly fading, and to read this through the lens of daily life rather than a narrative of crisis.
Erhan Kurtuluş
He studied engineering and became acquainted with sound recording technologies and computer-based sound production during his student years. This acquaintance continued with music production, DJing, sound engineering, and sound design studies. He seeks to create new contexts and meanings by manipulating sound recordings he collects from diverse environments, drawing inspiration from urban, natural, and human activities, through digital tools. In recent years, he has been collaborating with artists from different disciplines such as visual, video, and performance, creating joint productions and becoming a fundamental component of collaborative practice.
Melisa Kurtuluş
She is a researcher artist working through performance, movement, sound, video, and site-specific practices. In recent years, especially in the context of the earthquake she experienced in 2023, her work has been shaped around themes such as loss, grief, memory, traces, displacement, and witnessing. Through sound, movement, and simple materials/material interventions, she creates interactive performative structures that are relational to the space and process-oriented with the audience. Since 2018, she has been one of the founders and an active member of Antakya Performative Collective, and the group conducts multidisciplinary studies on the themes of memory and collective experience.
Connections:
https://www.behance.net/erhankurtulus
https://soundcloud.com/theseyh
www.instagram.com/sinestezikkaniksa_ma
This page is published on 20 August 2026.
