the soil you tread on

 (2019)

The work “See not the soil you tread on as mere earth” seeks to create an archive of the so-called labour battalions in Turkey in the First World War. While used by various other countries in WWI, in the Ottoman Empire the Greeks and other minorities were forced to serve as unfree labour under these battalions. The focus of the archive is Dido Sotiriyu’s fictional book “Farewell Anatolia”. Sotiriyu has written a “memoir” - as it must possibly have happened - for a Greek Villager from Ephesus -Manolis Aksiyoti- who has taken to labour battalions in 1914 in Anatolia. In “Soil You Thread On,” the stations of Labour Battalion (Ankara, Yozgat and Sivas) that were described in the book were revisited and a complementary visual archive was created in order to set the scene for the events that must possibly have happened. Through this visual archive of photos and maps, blurred lines between fiction, memory, archive, mapping and history are brought into question.