Delice, Single Channel Video, 15'45'', 2024

Starting from a personal geography — the Aegean town of Küçükkuyu, where the artist has spent every summer since childhood — Delice follows Zeki, an olive grower whose artisanal practice centers on the grafting of the delice: the wild olive (Olea europaea var. sylvestris) that grows spontaneously across the region. In Turkish, delice means mad, crazy — and in the folk understanding of olive cultivation, grafting is what tames it: the wild tree comes to its senses and bears fruit. The film attends to this act not as agricultural technique but as a figure for a different relation to land, knowledge, and transformation — one that does not domesticate but enables.

Delice developed within the continuity of the long-term research project Roots, Roads, Traces (2020–2025), which pursued a rumored agreement between Turkey and Spain in the early 1950s concerning the transfer of this olive species. Where that research produced a book — a written record of institutional and personal archives, of journeys and narratives — Delice operates in a different register, attending to what resists documentation: gesture, duration, the knowledge held in a grower's hands.

Shot over five years, the film's extended timeline was not incidental. Beginning with amateur recordings in the summer of 2020, completed in 2022, and edited in 2024, the accumulation of time shaped both the material and the conditions under which it could be understood. Delice was first shown at Sender 126, Hamburg, accompanied by a reading performance.

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Camera & Editing: Ayse Ates

Voices: Zeki Polisoglu

Sound Design: Çagil Cebeci

Color Grading: Jona Dohr

With support from Freundeskreis Projektförderung

With gratitude to Zeki Polisoglu