The flash fiction
Seen from a macro perspective, each individual is a temporary aggregation of countless elements shaped by historical conditions. History exists somewhere between the past and the present, connected only by human memory—yet memory itself is unreliable. Between history and memory, is there such a thing as collective memory? Can there ever be an accurate history? Can human imagination truly reach the past? In this reality, shaped by both speculation and memory, it seems that the truth of history survives only in fragments.
I do not dare to claim any history I’ve known as definitive. To me, history—like the self—is a series of temporary formations that occur under nonlinear time. It is a fleeting yet eternal afterimage, a resonance that transcends space and time. In André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, he proposed the method of automatic writing, in which thoughts are allowed to emerge unconsciously, forming a stream of intuitive connections. In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, imagination reconstructs entire cities from memory—cities that are fictional, ancient, absurd, and suspended in fractured space and time. Both authors explore the same question: how to use fragments of dreams, memories, and events to recompose the real.
How can different modes of imagination help us divide, reorganize, and deconstruct reality and history? How can we trace an interwoven thread among cultures, individuals, and material forms, starting from the everyday? Carrying these unresolved questions, I returned to Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria six months later. I tried to respond using the language I know best—photography. Through it, I began creating new events, allowing them to become experience, to become living stories.