MELISA YAGMUR SAYDI // melagro

Artist & Filmmaker

Ramblings On Survival (In progress)

Video - Around 5 minutes


This is a short animation planned to be shown in OVNi Videoart Biennale, Nice in 2026.  The animation takes place in 2025, when the horror in Gaza is being live-streamed to the world, without any intervention. Tech autocrats like Elon Musk are gaining more and more power. And on a daily basis, we are exposed to their buffoonery and displays of power. In addition to this, my brain is completely lost in my own chaos of unemployment, career pursuit, emails and applications. My imagination is damaged, it now reminds me of a broken computer. In this piece, I create a dreamlike landscape of this increasingly uncertain context, while developing a new visual style, moving from collage to a more graphic approach.

I started the video in Nice at the OVNI residency. At the time, Musk was constantly in the news, and Trump had announced his dream of turning Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Meanwhile, I had just arrived from the Middle East to the French Riviera to do a residency in a luxurious hotel. During that period, I was also stepping back from activism, and in the 2nd week of the residency, I left the activist collective I had co-founded in 2020. Emerged during that period when I was leaving activism and struggling with unemployment while fascism and violence were on the rise, this intimate work examines the balance between protecting oneself and others, and what 'survival' means in a neoliberal world.



Queer Autonomous Zone Along The Pink Line 

(2024-Present)


Transdisciplinary, long-term collective



The Queer Autonomous Zone (QAZ) Along the Pink Line is a long-term, transdisciplinary art project conceived as a conceptual and mobile space. The project builds on journalist Mark Gevisser’s notion of the “pink line”, a geopolitical divide where queerness is framed as “Western,” instrumentalized by authoritarian and nationalist regimes, and shaped by histories of colonialism, migration, and global inequality. By envisioning a queer autonomous region undivided by the pink-line,  QAZ explores how queer autonomy can be imagined, practiced and cared for across —and beyond— national borders and political demarcations.

QAZ moves and changes shape through collaborations with queer artists and activists across Turkey and Europe, and multi-arts experimentation including performance, video, photography, publications, and community-based interventions. In this way, it offers a non-territorial, non-bordered space for queer autonomy while humorously critiquing statehood and centralized authority.

Since 2024, I actively take part in the conceptual development of the project, designing its important happenings and connecting various actors together with Onur Tayranoğlu. Additionally, I have produced multiple video works documenting QAZ actions, contributed to its publications and designed the visual identity of QAZ.

The actions of QAZ are archived, and auto-fictional “QAZ diaries,” slowly constructing QAZ’s story, are kept by me and Tayranoğlu. Using this archive, a docu-fiction film that culminates the QAZ process will be completed in December 2027. The film, co-directed by me and Tayranoğlu, will follow the traces of QAZ as if it were a real, de facto zone, investigating its participants, actions, and history. It will blend live-action and animation to construct the docu-fiction universe.


Bedtime Stories from QAZ (2024)
Performative gathering at Stoa Library Helsinki



Manifesto(s) of QAZ (2025)
Zine publication 

Features : Melagro, A.D.M.M.P, Mi’r, Nasim,
Mor vejîn.

This zine is the outcome of a collective effort within QAZ. It brings together manifestos written in five non-institutionalized languages spoken along the Pink Line : Karelian, Kurdish, Ladino, Romanes, and Syriac.

QAZ envisions itself as a decentralized space, connecting diverse queer communities. Rather than producing a single declaration, we embraced the multiplicity of our voices—gathering five manifestos written by five queers who carry these languages despite everything, reflecting intersecting forms of solidarity.

Each writer shares their visions of ‘autonomy’ and of QAZ, intertwining the perspective of their language and people with a queer lens. So they share the experiences and dreams that shape QAZ.  Their manifestos speak from the fractures between borders. Together, they make queer autonomy and interdependence visible; they refuse erasure and assimilation, celebrate plurality, and insist on the right to exist and to speak in our own words.

In addition to the conceptual development, visual design, and production of the whole project, I contributed a text in Ladino called “The Happy-assed Prayer to the Gods of the Pimps’ Synagogue.” Like “happy-assed” (kulo alegre in Ladino), which is used to describe queer people, I constructed the text using the characteristic idioms of Ladino. By working with Ladino’s argot and playful tone, I established a rebellious queer tone. I intersected my narrative with Jewish sex workers and socialists of the Ottoman era.


“ We find memory in everything you thought we forgot, we remember
we get stuck in your guts, won’t go down even with laxatives, we're so annoying, so rude, such bastards.
They say, don’t wash the dead too much, or they’ll come back to life.  “

(Excerpt from my text, English translation)


Link to the full zine : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZNDrcmfSgwqgDh-uFCaZL94Xhj7aj7B_/view







The following works intersect QAZ and Tayranoğlu’s process-based performance Pink Bill, in which they seek exemption from mandatory military service by proving their queerness to the Turkish state and military. To do this, they must engage with a medical system that diagnoses queerness as a psychosexual disorder—the very diagnosis provides the exemption. These works are conceptually developed by Tayranoğlu and Saydı during the Pink-Bill process, and documented by Saydı to be used in the QAZ docu-fiction film, for the segment narrating how Onur joins QAZ.




Roll Call (2024)
Video, 7:32 minutes

Roll Call archives the first step of Tayranoğlu’s process of proving his queerness to the state in order to be exempted from the military: filling out the military check-up form online. The performance of queerness begins already with this form. They list “dance” as their hobby and “psychosexual disorder” as their illness.

https://youtu.be/2JE7BRy4QGY?si=AxM_uC1WGj6ORYFT
Farewell (2024)
Video-Performance, 5:28 minutes


Farewell is a performance that celebrates Onur’s successful proof of their queerness to the state and their exemption from military service.  In the performance, the codes of the Turkish “military send-off” ritual —typically held before men depart for service—are used with a satirical twist. The classic moment of locking eyes with the mother turns into the act of putting on nail polish. The traditional military shawl that reads “now, he is a soldier” becomes “now, he is …. you know”. In this way, the patriarchal nation-state codes of the ritual are queered and reversed. Still, the performance presented in PerformIstanbul in 2024, remains a “farewell”. The video-documentation will be used in the film, in the section showing Onur’s departure for QAZ.


https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sYYtUtK5eYDKVzMmxRPjyk96yu3m3Dti/view?usp=sharing





A stain of light on my screen, traveling down

through your pixels (2024)


Audiovisual performance and poetry - 30 minutes



The performance was presented in Antwerp, beneath the monumental domes of ExtraCity, a former church converted into an art space, as part of Out of Sight’s Close Encounters program. It was the result of a 1.5-month residency at MORPHO (organized by Salt & MHKA) on audiovisual performance.




A stain of light on my screen, traveling down through your pixels, is a 30-minute-long audiovisual performance. It displays a constant process of visual integration and disintegration, where live footage, animation clips, DIY feedback, and synthesis effects blend into each other through a mapped MIDI controller.







Two characters, removed from their original videographic contexts, reappear repeatedly during the performance. Lines from a poem dedicated to these anonymous characters appear on screen in sequence.  The poem describes the artist's coincidental encounters with them, noting how, stripped of identity, their digital images now serve as narrative and compositional elements. A live sound environment, created with video-triggered sound effects and a synthesizer, accompanies the meditative process.

As the instrument that illuminates the night and forms images in the darkness,  the streetlight had a symbolic place in the universe of the performance. I recognized it as an enabler of videographic imagination, just like the beamer, granting access to the scenes and bodies that later gain poetic meaning on screen. Its image recurred during the performance, in animations and in the footage I had gathered during city nightwalks. A small lamp, resembling a streetlight, illuminated my setup.

Overall, the performance examined my relationship with media as a video artist perpetually archiving her surroundings, questioning how meaning is ascribed to recorded material and how memory is structured. The constant flux, fragmentation and pixelation served as poetic tools, and conveyed a metaphor for how memory constructs itself by continually rebuilding, interpreting, and altering lived experience.





This booklet combines additional lines of text and graphic works, with scenes and poetry from the performance. Just as in the performance itself, it reveals a fluid transformation of the digital image. Copies of this print were available to take home after the performance.

Digital print, 15 pages, 7,4 x 10,5 cm




Close Encounters & Closing Sessions, Extra City - October 2024 - Antwerp, Belgium 




Conquest of Argentina (2022)


Video - 4:04 minutes


Conquest of Argentina satirically criticizes the dominant narrative of Turkish history that constructs the history of Turkey around the concept of conquest centering "the Turkish race".

The satire is conveyed through text, set design, body language and voice. The film reuses memorized nationalist phrases and clichés, and displaces banal symbols such as the flag and the image of territory, challenging its audience to rethink them. The incompleteness of the scenographic elements underlines the fragility and artificiality of this historical narrative. Plastic rocks stacked on top of each other, appearing hard from outside but being soft inside, become a metaphor of nation-state historiography.

Thus, Conquest of Argentina criticizes the military aggressions and expansionism of the current government on the one hand, and the problematic relationship with the past, with minorities and with territory on the other hand.

Drift collective exhibition  
La Friche la Belle de Mai - Marseille, France (2023)


Pebbles Underground Film and Video Art Festival - January 2025 - Online                
Festival Parallèle, MAC Marseille - November 2023 - Marseille, France 
Drift – Dérapage contrôlé, Friche La Belle de Mai - Aug.-Oct. 2023 - Marseille, France
7.8.7.5 Fundraiser / Gathering, Grey Space - February 2023 - The Hague, Netherlands

CANKUŞ (2021-2023)


Animation series - 4 episodes

Cankuş is a 4-episode experimental animation series and a hybrid work that merges video art with cinematic language. Its episodes have been screened internationally at film and video art festivals, including ECRÃ in MAM Rio (Rio de Janeiro, BR). The project also extends into an immersive installation format. Two distinct versions of the installation have been presented at OVNi Festival (Nice, FR) and CURRENTS Festival (Santa Fe, USA), where I recreate the series' distinctive interiors and textures in physical space. Cankuş is a walk through a psycho-political space in post-covid Turkey affected by inflation, authoritarianism and unequal urbanization. It describes the anxiety and the alienation caused by this context, while searching for humor and poetry in the act of surviving.

Cankuş addresses Turkey's authoritarian reality where the ruling power seeks to infiltrate and dominate every sphere, from the streets to the home. The government that completely dominates the public sphere, both through its shaping of the city (unplanned, unequal, and profit-driven urbanization) and through the constant omnipresence of propaganda, extends its influence into the personal and intimate sphere via the media.

Cankuş, the main character, watches the gradual shrinking of the democratic space in the Turkish parliament (Ep.1) or the government’s propaganda spots  (Ep.4) on TV when they’re home. When they step outside, they wander as if in a dream through the city that’s been completely transformed over the past 20 years by the same government’s aggressive construction policies. They repeatedly encounter propaganda visuals about those very policies, and the same politicians' faces, again and again, on billboards in the streets and on screens in public transport.

In Cankuş, reality is depicted with little alteration. For Ülo Pikkov, adopting this approach in animation means entering the genre of “anti-animation” and portraying a dystopian world. Drawing on Soviet animations, also produced in authoritarian contexts, Pikkov states: "Compared to live-action narrative cinema, which creates dystopias mainly by means of staged fantasies, animated film works exactly the other way around: dystopia is typically based on realism. An animated film that breaks with its essential paradigm of fantasy and strives to represent reality or depict a documentary plot produces a dystopian view of the world." In this sense, Cankuş is an example of anti-animation, using actual sound recordings and footage from Istanbul and Turkish TV to incorporate Turkey’s contemporary reality.

In the series, government propaganda is reproduced with little change, pushed into absurdity to achieve its satire. For exemple, a frequent trope in Turkey today, the “we built the biggest…” advert, appears as  “we built the biggest zeppelin landing area”. In another instance, the audio from the propagandistic TOGG launch ceremony remains almost unchanged while the visual track is completely subverted. (Ep.4)

Created over 2 years of research, Cankuş is where I forged a personal audiovisual style defined by a DIY, mixed-media aesthetic. I developed an authorial approach to combining and editing heterogeneous materials, bringing together hand drawings, photography, live footage, animation, graphic elements, found online images, creative coding and video synthesis.

The near-real yet digitally altered textures and settings mirror the character’s 
entanglement with the media and the digital world. Spaces transformed from real photographs, such as Cankuş’s bathroom, or the overlayering of realistic images onto pixelated and distorted textures, evoke a sense of alienation, and a form of “digital psychedelia” where different realms blend into each other. We cannot clearly distinguish when Cankuş is under the influence of media and the ruling authority, when they are day-dreaming, or when they are in objective reality.



THE EPISODES 


English subtitles are available via the CC button

EP. 1: The state must be ruled by backflips! (2021)
1:40 minutes
https://youtu.be/YGOyX8eQq4U
EP. 2: There’s a blank in my memory (2021)
2:59 minutes
https://youtu.be/h6OFNHNnqI8
EP. 3: Birdie’s Dream (2022)
3:00 minutes
https://youtu.be/GT_HoBvxmGg

EP. 4: Walking Around My Head (2023)
09:47 minutes
https://youtu.be/v4C2543OfZs


INSTALLATIONS


The installations developed around Cankuş parallel the series’ merging of realities. Through uncanny-textured digital prints placed on walls, floors, and windows, as well as objects from the series—such as Cankuş’s T-shirt and the clock from their living room—the animated universe is re-created within the exhibition space. The episodes are shown on screens embedded in this environment. In this setting, the boundaries between the animated world and the physical space blur and screens operate as spatial thresholds, extending the logic of the Cankuş universe into the viewer’s embodied experience.


Currents New Media & Technology Festival (2025)


Installation video : 
https://youtube.com/shorts/CdDfKpe-xGM?si=mmao5J4Jw3pA7z2Y


OVNi Video Art Festival (2023)
 Sud Emergence Awards 
For OVNi where each video artist transforms a hotel room in Nice, I transformed the view from the room’s windows into a distorted city. The installation received the Sud Emergence Award.



Pixel x Pixel, The University of Texas at Dallas – October 2025 – Dallas, USA
CURRENTS Festival,  Museo Cultural de Santa Fe –June 2025 – Santa Fe, USA
Short Cuts Berlin, Madame Claude – April 2025 – Berlin, Germany
Rawy Films Pop-up Cinema, Z-inema – April 2025 – Berlin, Germany
Olhares do Mediterrâneo, Cinema São Jorge – November 2024 – Lisbon, Portugal
3x3 Short Film Program, Beyoğlu Sineması – October 2024 – Istanbul, Turkey
Festival ECRÃ̃, MAM Rio – June–July 2024 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Refest, Culturehub – June 2024 – Online
Cadence Video Poetry Festival, Northwest Film Forum – April 2024 – Seattle, USA
Si cinéma – Art School Films Festival – March 2024 – Hérouville Saint-Clair, France
Festival OVNI, West End Hotel – Nov.–Dec. 2023 – Nice, France

The Hero’s Quest  (2020)


Video-Performance with Onur Tayranoğlu



The Hero’s Quest portrays a queer body existing in a queer space and time, moving through multiple versions of themselves in the past, the present, the future, here and there. Once we step outside the myth of heroes who triumph, what sort of non-linear and queer stories can we create, and how can we redefine what a hero is, anyway? How does this change our perception of winning or losing, productivity, progress, and history?  Shot against the backdrop of Istanbul's vertical architecture, the work connects these questions with Turkey's aggressive construction policies. 










Queer Art Film Night, Platform  - January 2024 - Vaasa, Finland
Absence Festival of Artez University of the Arts - October 2021 - Arnhem, Netherlands