The Peace Mural: A PARTicipatory Project between Children from Chios, Greece and Izmir, Turkey

Abstract

Children, Youth and Environments 18(2), 2008 The Peace Mural: A PARTicipatory Project between Children from Chios, Greece and Izmir, Turkey Deniz Hasirci Izmir University of Economics Izmir, Turkey Citation: Hasirci, Deniz (2008). “The Peace Mural: A PARTicipatory Project between Children from Chios, Greece and Izmir, Turkey.” Children, Youth and Environments 18(2): 236-249. Keywords: youth, children, participation, mentorship, partnership, creativity, Turkey, Greece Introduction This study is about a collaborative project between three partners: Izmir University of Economics (IEU); the Turkish-German Foundation for Culture and Education (TAKEV), which is an elementary school; and Kids’ Guernica, an international initiative for peace. Izmir University of Economics established a buddy program with TAKEV Elementary School that paired university and elementary school students to work on specific projects. In the 2007-2008 academic year, we interviewed students and instructors to study the effects of the program on their creativity, self-confidence, responsibility, and opinions about the curricula. The University decided to implement the buddy program in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Design at IEU because visible results could be obtained in a short time, and because of the growing interest in these fields among middle-school children in Turkey. The five departments in the fine arts department are: Fashion Design, Interior Architecture, Architecture, Industrial Design, and Communication Design. The program began with Fashion Design, and moved on to Interior Architecture and Environmental Design, through which the partnership with Kids’ Guernica was developed. It is this latter development, when the buddy program partnered with the Kids’ Guernica project, which is the main subject of this photo essay.© 2008 Children, Youth and Environments The Peace Mural: A PARTicipatory Project between Children... 237 Fashion Design Buddy Program The IEU buddy program with TAKEV Elementary School began with the Fashion Design Department. In the program, younger and older students worked together on models. The project gave the younger students a sense of university life, while the university students gained a sense of responsibility by aiding the younger students. The buddy program received wide publicity in the local and national Turkish newspapers. Figures 1-3. The first buddy group: workshop with the fashion design department The Peace Mural: A PARTicipatory Project between Children... 238 The coordinators searched for other participatory projects in art or design in order to extend the buddy program. Around the same time, Kids’ Guernica contacted the program to do a joint project. Peace Mural by Children from Chios and Izmir Kids Guernica is a project of peace for children. Its aim is to create peace paintings in various parts of the world in a participatory way. The canvases are the same size as Pablo Picasso's 1937 Guernica (3.5 m × 7.8 m), in which the painter showed the brutality of the Spanish civil war during the bombing of the city of Guernica. Through the IEU buddy program,1 in May 2007 we made arrangements to bring together children from Chios, Greece and Izmir, Turkey to paint a peace mural under the auspices of Kids’ Guernica.2 The painting was started in Chios and travelled to Izmir in September 2007 with a group of Greek children and supervisors where they continued work on it together. The initial painting took a whole new direction with the cooperation of the children from different backgrounds. In Izmir, the participants took part in a three-day workshop to discuss the topics of “peace,” the idea of countries being geographically and culturally very close but The Peace Mural: A PARTicipatory Project between Children... 239 politically distant, and Picasso’s work. The workshop also helped the participants form a cooperative atmosphere from which to complete the painting. After the workshop, the painting was exhibited in the Zappion–Megaron in Athens in conjunction with the symposium entitled “Productivity of Culture” on October 18 and 19, 2007. The symposium was organized by the Network of European Cultural Capital Cities. Second- and third-year Interior Architecture and Environmental Design students from the IUE, seventh- and eighth-grade students from the TAKEV School, and eight children from Chios worked together on the painting of peace. The photos below depict the process of creating the children’s peace mural. Figures 6-7...