Synesthetic Beings

Synesthetic Beings is a series of sculptures in which I combine cloves with remnants of my everyday life—objects such as a showerhead, an egg carton, a cream tube, and a disposable hair dye comb. These materials, often dismissed as waste, already carry the traces of my past.  On one hand, the work engages viewers through a powerful sensory register: smell. The cloves emit a scent directly connected to the limbic system, the part of the brain that governs emotion and memory. On the other hand, the installation invokes the Kurdish ritual of Sêva Mêxekrêj—a traditional practice in which an apple is covered entirely in cloves and offered to loved ones as a symbol of love, gratitude, or reconciliation. It is said that its smell lingers for a hundred years. By slowing down the rapid pace of consumption and confronting it with a ritual that requires patience and care, the work creates friction between contemporary waste and ancestral devotion. Within this process, discarded objects of the human world take on the form of reptiles (animal world) and, through the scent of cloves (plant world), are transformed into hybrid beings. The result is a temporal disturbance—an archaeology of the present—that makes space for speculative futures. In this way, I aim to evoke things that move beyond mere semiotics—objects that exist not just as signs, but as presences. They are situated in the slippage between memory and material, scent and time, care and decay—a future imaginary born from everyday remains.