XINALIQ: Territory as Memory / Image as Translation
Fieldwork in Northern Azerbaijan, 2015
This project originated from an assignment during a feature film production in Azerbaijan, where I worked as an assistant art director. While initially logistical—scouting a remote location and studying its material characteristics—the journey evolved into a critical observation on the aesthetics of periphery, cinematic staging, and cultural translation.
The village of Xınalıq, located high in the Quba region, sits suspended in both altitude and historical isolation. Framed by the Greater Caucasus, the village confronts the visitor with a striking duality: geographic remoteness and symbolic density. It is a place shaped not only by its stone structures and harsh winters, but by its abstraction within national imaginaries—as folklore, as spectacle, as otherness.
My task was to examine an existing stone house where the film's exterior scenes would be shot, while a full-scale interior replica was being built on set. This doubling—original and copy, real and staged—became central to my inquiry. What does it mean to displace a vernacular structure from its site? What kind of narrative is constructed when architecture is extracted, flattened, and reassembled for cinematic use?
Photographic fragments from this journey explore material echoes—dust, stone, snow, light—captured through transient conditions. They are not images of a location, but traces of an encounter between site and fiction, realism and re-enactment. The road to Xınalıq, the fog that veiled it, the worn hotel that hosted us briefly—all contribute to a spatial palimpsest that resists clear categorization.
In retrospect, this work reveals a tension between presence and distance: the camera as both witness and instrument of removal. The production’s goals—to replicate, reconstruct, reframe—mirror broader questions in architecture and representation: What remains when context is removed? What is lost when landscape becomes image?
This is not a documentation of place, but an essay in spatial translation. It is an attempt to hold still that which is inherently unstable: memory, atmosphere, and the dissonance of observing without fully belonging.