NEIGHBOR
The project Neighbor started to build around the photographs taken by 13 years old Arif, who is a refugee from Syria. Arif migrated to Turkey with his family in 2015 from a city that had lived the catastrophe in a very deep sense: Aleppo. In the summer of 2017, he took photographs with a disposable camera, in the environment he lives in, without any instructions or guidance. These photographs serve as a documentation of a refugee life that was resettled and drawn or affected by the ongoing crisis. Arif is a kid who works every day, collecting cardboards and papers on the streets of a neighborhood in Ankara in order to help his family to maintain a living, in the course of growing disagreements in the Turkish society after 2.86 million refugees that were resettled inside the borders of Turkey.
Five months later, in the winter of 2018, after a conflict broke out between Arif’s family and other families in the neighborhood, Arif and his family decided to move. Neighbor contains a walk tracing the photographs made by Arif until we arrive to the middle of the neighborhood he was living in. In this manner, a connection was made, with the simplest form of traveling: physical walking. A connection made between the places that Arif photographed, to the places he lived in; however chose not to photograph. The duration of the video also becomes significant as it stands out to represent a physical distance. Neighbor aims to evoke and discuss temporality and invisibility since it was the reality of Arif and his family.
