This project began with a feeling, something between remembering and imagining. So much of Crimean Tatar culture has had to survive in pieces: in the memories of our elders, in music and dance passed down without words, in objects and ornaments that have outlasted those who made them. I started collecting those pieces—sounds, shapes, memories—and letting them speak through animation.

I learned the style of ornament carving in Kyiv, in the studio of Rustem Skybin. He’s not just an artist, he’s a keeper of stories. He’s revived and protected a ceramic tradition that’s thousands of years old, while also inventing new ways of making, like his technique Quru Isar. He merges ancient calligraphic patterns with a contemporary philosophy grounded in “the continuation of life on Earth.” This ethos deeply informs my approach to animation: layering repetition, texture, and abstraction to create a visual language that extends and transforms the ornamental traditions I was taught.

In this animation, I’ve taken the ornamental patterns I learned and started to reimagine them in motion. Animation becomes a vessel for remembering, imagining, and continuing.  I wanted the animation to feel handmade, like something pulled from memory or from the earth itself.

The audio consists of two rare Crimean Tatar vinyl tracks, digitized by a friend earlier this year. You can hear the crackle, the warmth, the kind of texture that makes you feel like you’re listening through time.

The title appears in three languages, Crimean Tatar, Ukrainian, and English: hatırdan soñ toprak yatıraq / за пам’яттю лежить земля / beyond memory lies the land. I chose this order on purpose. It’s a bridge between languages, places, and parts of myself. Some things can only be said fully when they’re said in more than one voice.

This piece is about memory, land, culture, and how they don’t end, but shift, change shape, continue. Beyond memory lies the land. Beyond the land, the memory persists. For some of us, that is all that remains—and all that must continue.