JINHA

ISTANBUL – The Street Culture Center brings free art activities to the residents of Istanbul’s Gazi neighborhood. Culture center instructor Çağla Aydın explained that the role of art is important in resisting state assimilation policies targeting neighborhoods like this.

In Istanbul’s Gazi neighborhood, home to working-class Kurds and members of the Alevi minority, state policies target the neighborhood for assimilation. The Street Culture Center in Gazi aims to resist with art. Culture center Çağla Aydın said that against the bourgeois monopoly on culture and art, the center “defends an approach to art on the side of the people.”

The culture center holds a summer school for Gazi’s children, with activities from painting to music, theatre to ceramics. The summer school also hosted a “Women’s Drama Workshop” with the women of Gazi. Since September, the center has been hosting regular workshops, theatre events and “Gazi cinema days.”

“Our real project is getting art and artistic activities to people who can’t reach them,” said Çağla. “Against the ruling power’s reactionary, racist, sexist attitude, we struggle for a liberatory right to education.”

Çağla noted that the state has targeted revolutionary neighborhoods like Gazi with policies that aim to create informants; push the drug trade into the neighborhood; and assimilate the residents. She said the state has recently escalated violence and police attacks in the neighborhood, which negatively affects children.

“Because art is treated as the monopoly of the bourgeoisie, it’s seen as a luxury in the neighborhoods. However, when people are left without art, they can’t express themselves,” said Çağla. “So we’re trying to create the argument that everyone can express themselves.”

(dek/ck/mg/cm)