Digital video. ORT 11 min 02 sec.

During a four-month stint living in Istanbul, I was often mistaken for a native. I would sometimes go along to see how far I could stretch it, enjoying my fictional Turkish self. But inevitably, the evidence would give away my true identity, my speech revealing New York and my features pointing to Italy. 

But I had a tie-in to Turkey long before ending up there. Growing up in my hometown of Gaeta, Italy, I had been told stories of Turkish pirates arriving by boat, hiding out in a cave that’s now known as La Grotta del Turco, sleeping during the day and coming out to pillage the town at night. These legends ran wild in my mind and made me wonder how much of our Italian town could claim some amount of Turkish lineage.

This idea of being mistaken, the slippage of identity, was the seed for this project.

When I first visited the traditional Turkish bathhouse of Çemberlitaş Hamamı in Istanbul, it felt like I was looking at a reverse peephole, a portal back to Italy and the bathhouses in Rome, a  point of contrast to the Grotta del Turco of my childhood. I knew this had to be the site of my next project. In this video, watch me getting scrubbed down by two Turkish bathers whose gestures slowly begin wearing away at my body, erasing me from the frame. This was my way of exploring the linked histories between the two countries, the way bathhouses have historically been a place where culture meets ritual and vulnerability meets masculinity.