Aysegül Savas

Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? Can they create their own traditions and rituals? Whom can they consider family?

As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, spends her days gathering footage from the neighborhood park like an anthropologist observing local customs. “Forget about daily life,” chides her grandmother on the phone. “We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park.” Life back in Asya and Manu's respective home countries continues-parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly beyond their reach. But the world they're making in their new city is growing, too, they hope, into something that will be distinctly theirs. As they open up the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Hailed by Lauren Groff and Marina Abramovic, Savas's fine, precise craft turns The Anthropologist's simple apartment search into a soulful, often funny, examination of modern coupledom, home-building, and expat life in the universal modern city.

The Anthropologists

Giovana 

Where do I feel most like myself? I don't know how to answer that question. I guess I'm still looking.

We stood looking at the living room, crammed with our life. Already, we had discussed leaving most of these things behind when we moved. The artworks would be more refined, the furnishings statelier and few in number. But it seemed now like a betrayal.

My mother and grandmother were always telling me to focus on my own life. I agreed with them, but I didn't quite know where my life began and how far it extended. I didn't want to risk cutting off any vital parts.

On my way out of the apartment, I put on a pair of impractical yellow shoes to match my top. Impracticality was its own type of festivity.

I felt stifled by the clarity of my knowledge, which seemed unreal, or too real. As if everyone ended up living the same sort of life, describing it with the same words. With enough focus, I could probably predict our lives as well, the types of people we would resemble. There was something inevitable in choosing, in looking ahead: there were only so many options. But just now, I preferred not to think about it too much.

Mika

“Manu and I simply got along: we could sit together in silence; we didn’t really work to maintain a state of harmony. I felt secure with him, like being indoors during a downpour.”

The Anthropologists quotes

Join the club