Project brings youth from western and eastern Turkey together

The BAK project brings together youth from Izmir, Canakkale, Diyarbakir and Batman to collaborate in audio and visual art projects

Under the project "Look at the city to remember and explain," the Diyarbakir Art Centre (DSM) is building bridges between youth of two western and two eastern cities, while providing them an opportunity to look at their cities through visual arts in an alternative way.

The BAK project -- meaning look -- brings together more than 20 people ages 18 to 26 from Batman, Canakkale, Diyarbakir and Izmir to carry out joint photography and video projects, focusing on the memory of their cities through untold stories.

The project aims to tell unique stories about their cities, let the stories be known to each other and provide an environment to establish relations and contact between residents of different geographies so that they co-operate in developing photography and video art.

The selection of polar opposite cities is no accident. Izmir and Canakkale are known as centres of secular Turkish nationalism, while Diyarbakir is the centre of the Kurdish political movement and Batman is considered as one of the most religiously conservative cities.

The first stage of the project took place between April 20th and 24th at a time when the weapons had silenced and hope for peace high as a result of government-PKK peace talks. Youth from Izmir and Canakkale visited Diyarbakir for five days of activities, getting to know their counterparts in Diyarbakir and Batman.

A large portion of the Diyarbakir-Batman programme was devoted to workshops and debates over photography and video. At the same time, the youth met with artists from Batman and Diyarbakir. Through these workshops and interactions the visiting youth got to know the cities, the cities' stories and each other.

DSM co-ordinator Ovgu Gokce told SES Türkiye the entire project starts with one question: "Is it possible from a distance to develop common projects, collective work and bring together these cities' experiences?"

The reason for focusing on cities and memory, Gokce said, is because "cities determine identity and at the same time represent different value judgements developed from the country's different regions."

The project looks outside of mainstream history through visual arts and examines the daily life of cities and its inhabitants, Gokce said. Peeling away a city layer by layer, the projects might, for example, tell the untold story of the past 20 years of an elderly tailor or understanding a city through its signs.

During the course of the time in Diyarbakir, Gokce said, the youth from the west were very interested the things they encountered in the city and integrated well.

What allowed the youth to develop relations was their common interest in photography and video. Looking at daily life, people, nature and the streets opened up new topics and subjects to debate.

At the end of the Diyarbakir-Batman meeting the youth formed groups among themselves and decided to start research projects for video and photography projects. Even after the youth from Izmir and Canakkale returned, for the next two months they maintain relations with their counterparts in Diyarbakir and Batman to start projects together.

Then in late June, participants came together again in Izmir and Canakkale, where they carried out similar activities as in Diyarbakir and further developed their ideas for collaborative projects.

Out of the second meeting a number of interesting joint projects were planned for the summer. One joint project will examine changes along the Tigris River in Diyarbakir through photography and sound. Another photography project will bring together two youth from Izmir and Batman to look at the increasing role of women in the traditionally male dominated haircutting field. Yet another project will look at changes in wedding photos and another the lost Greek language of Anatolia.

Serdar Bayram from Diyarbakir and Murat Esiyok from Izmir are now working together on a "Sounds of Diyarbakir" project that records the sounds of daily life in Diyarbakir. Through audio and video format they are capturing the cacophony the peddlers on the streets, the roar of military fighter jets overhead, and the church bells and call to prayer which give Diyarbakir its character.

Speaking to SES Türkiye, Bayram said the first meetings were "very productive" and the second meeting built upon the foundation so that the youth could work together on concrete projects.

"There were certain prejudices among the participants in the project against each other, but the project broke these, both for the youth from over there, and for us. We have commonalities, we formed a common language and mixed with each other," he said.

Bayram said for both youth from the west and southeast they learned a lot about other cities.

Esiyok also said prejudices were broken down by the BAK project because it brought so many different people together.

"Our friends from western Turkey always followed events in this region [Diyarbakir] from the media and were not getting the correct information," he said, adding that by seeing and speaking to people first-hand, many previously held perception were broken.

Bayram and Esiyok plan to finish their production by the end of July. They attribute the possibility to work together to the BAK project and the relationships it has built for many youth.

"We come from different lives, from different foundations," Esiyok said. "We are not people that would normally come together but because of this project we came together."

The third meeting of BAK will take place in October in Diyarbakir. The projects developed by the students will then be put together in preparation for exhibits in late-2013 in Izmir, Canakkale, Diyarbakir and Batman.

Kaynak: SES Türkiye