Suat Ögüt buries mosaic artwork exploring memory and displacement

Artist Suat Ögüt, born in Diyarbakır, Turkey in 1986 and based between Amsterdam and Izmir, has created "Anatomía de la pertenencia" (Anatomy of Belonging), a mosaic buried underground that is barely visible to viewers. The work was inspired by a news story about a Gaza farmer whose olive trees could not grow because an ancient Byzantine mosaic beneath the soil blocked root development. Ögüt collaborated with Syrian mosaic artisan Abdurrahman Hamid, using natural stone and traditional techniques. The piece remains largely hidden, inviting a silent process of discovery. The olive tree, deeply tied to Mediterranean geographies and cultural memory, is reinterpreted as a displaced presence trying to root in unfamiliar soil. Ögüt's previous projects include "The Future of the Menemen-Mory," which reconstructed neighborhood histories through food, and "The First Turk Immigrant or The Nameless Heroes of the Revolution," which recovered family and migratory memory absent from institutional archives. The work shifts attention from visible surfaces to hidden underground systems, using root structures and fungal networks as metaphors for diasporic existence.