Salt, Take I, 2018, hand-drawn animation, 1 min 20 sec.
There is wind outside. We see a house. A body appears by the doors and points out and orders the child to go outside. We follow the footsteps of the child walking uphill in the steppes. The child is followed by the sounds of cowbells and cows mixing with the sounds of the wind. The child stops at a large rock formation, starts carving an image of a bird onto the rock with the help of a sharp stone. After he is done carving, he pours salt over the rock. The cows start licking rock as the carving of the bird is slowly erased.
The story is based on my family's history, a Circassian Tribe who exiled to Ottoman Empire. Every child had to shepherd the herd as their duty in the village in the middle of Anatolia. They have collectively over time carved many drawings to the rocks that showed the imagination of their circumstances. Those rocks were also used as saltlicks for the animals. Their village still exists in Turkish Republic.