The story begins before me. It lives in the bodies of the women in my family — in gestures, in silences, in a fear that was never explained.

For decades, this fear shaped how women in my family related to men. Shortly before her death, my grandmother revealed that she had been raped and forced to marry her abuser — my grandfather. Her silence became a legacy carried in the body.

I approach the body as an archive — a place where trauma is stored and repeated beyond words. My own experience of sexual violence became a point of recognition: this project is an attempt to confront what was silenced, and to trace how it shapes intimacy, fear, and closeness.

The male figure is anonymized — a distant, threatening presence — while the women remain specific, embodied carriers of this legacy: my grandmother, my mother, myself, and my daughter.

The forest becomes both setting and method: a space of obscured histories and initiation. Running through it is a central gesture — an act of agency and resistance against inherited fear. Step by step, the body rehearses another possibility: to move, to choose, to survive.

Understory reflects on postmemory as something lived through the body, asking whether this transmission can be interrupted  and transformed for the next generation.