Raise your sound

What did we do?
LAG Kunst & Medien and Kirkayak Kültür both strongly believe in the positive effects arts education has on the development of strong personalities as well as community building across cultural differences and language barriers. Both our institutions rely on the creative works of artists from different fields such as music, media art (photography & film), visual arts, Streetart and literature. 
In this project we had planned to enable artists and participants from Germany and Turkey to step into communication through music. The Istanbul based musician Selda Öztürk and the Cologne based musician Franzis Lating both worked with a group of participants in real life and shared pieces of music like rhythms and melodies with eachother. Over the course of three months two pieces of music were created by the groups combining their work. The final presentation took place on May 11th 2022 via Zoom. The “official” release of the songs “BIRD” and “Eyvallah” happened on the 20th of June - World Refugee Day.
The Istanbul group of the project consisted of Syrian migrant women. İKGV and Nilgün Yıldırım Şener, provided connections with the women to come to the workshops. They provided support for the travel expenses of the participants so that they could continue to the workshops. The workshops were held at the Adem Baştürk Cultural Center in Esenler, with the support of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. A translator and to care the children a woman accompanied the workshops. A total of 19 women, mainly women between the ages of 20 and 30 attended the workshops.
The participants in Cologne were between five and 14 years old. The refugees came from Syria, Albania and Afghanistan. Some of them have been here in Germany for a few years, the participants from Afghanistan came in 2021. The group worked with harmonic instruments like the piano, keyboards, acoustic guitars but also electric guitars, electric bass and percussion instruments like djembes, congas and the classical drums. Most of the kids didn’t play an instrument before “Raise your Sound”, so they had the chance to learn basics on each instrument first.

Another important part of the project was editing the recordings and combine them. For that Selda and  Franzis mixed the tunes the participants had made. We created music scapes, collages and also a song. Bird song is a collage created by combining pieces of music produced by two groups. The song begins with Lilliş part, which means zılgıt. This song is an Arabic song about happiness and joy sung at weddings. After Lililiş part, the rhythm composition comes. In this composition, Zaffa is used which is a traditional rhythms and played at weddings. Next comes lyric piano part. And in accordance with the atmosphere of the music, it is connected to the Kurdish song called Serê Malan. While it is a dance song and is sung more upbeat, here it is sung in a lyrical and slow tempo to match the atmosphere. The Bird song ends with feeling of resistance and a struggling attitude in other words with composed rhythms. In the lyrics of Eyvallah, an Arabic song, the words "Welcome, guest of God" are said. Eyvallah is a cheerful music produced in harmony with the mood of the song and lyrics. In this song, a hybrid innovation is made on the pieces of music produced by the two groups.