Finally some work is made
After the endless discussion about which I have complained so much and yesterday’s experiments, we finally agreed to go and make something today. We had decided upon the site of the old prison, and one idea at least which had got people interested was to build a miniature version of the famous walls which surround the old city within the central courtyard. Like many such ideas it was lacking a “ok, but then what?” answer, but it had promise at least.
We started by plotting the outline of this structure in the dirt; this action itself produced some nice results in terms of photos and video. Sometimes in art the simplest interventions can work the best.
After this we began moving barrowloads of stone from an enormous pile outside the prison to within, and started constructing a small wall, perhaps 30cm x 30xm in dimension and covering an area of 5m x 3.6m.
What was lovely was that almost as soon as we had began with this task, curious people started turning up and asking us what we were up to (Mehmet, out translator, was unfortunately away so we weren’t able to answer), and in general they seemed to be pleased that someone was making some sort of active intervention in a space which had previously been associated with imprisonment and military rule.
Once again spontaneous things took over as a group of small boys arrived with a football and used our wall as a space to play in. Later the same and other children expressed a desire to help us with the construction, and began energetically filling our borrowed wheelbarrows with stones and moving them for us, to such an extent that we became a little ashamed of exploiting such (admittedly willing) child labour. All in all it was certainly an interesting day and for me at least it really worked as an interesting piece of live art. What is especially important was that today was the first time since arriving here that I felt like I was doing something more than being simply a western visitor leering in a voyueristic way at the destitute locals.
It is the quirky little things here that I find the most intesting. For example, we had talked about the possibility of painting the stones of our little wall, and so Mei-yu and Mehmet had set off to buy some pigment. Despite the fact that this is a Muslim county, there were not so many shops open on a Sunday, and this proved not as easy as expected. Finally they found a shop that was open, but which had only bright red and bright blue paint.
What I find lovely about this is that back home a shop would have paint in every colour of the fucking rainbow or none at all (because it was not a paint shop). Here there are these odd surprises.
Our tutors arrived as it was getting dark to give some feedback on our progress, and they seemed very happy with what we were doing. This was certainly reassuring after so many days of stumbling about in a fog of vague and conflicting ideas. We shall see what happens next.
Since Ólafur, one of the workshop leaders, is leaving in the morning we all went to have some dinner together. The thing is, the project had been able to achieve sponsorship from a particular restaurant, although only for the local students, and so for the last 4 days we have been eating there and nowhere else. Fine, I suppose, but the vegetarian options are limited to one single dish (cheese Turkish pizza), and I am frankly getting sick of it. I’m prepared to deal with it for now, though.
Afterwards we once again ended up having a few beers in the hotel lounge, and two of the group of Turkish guys from last night were also there. Before we knew what was happening, they had brought a whole chocolate cake to our table as a gift. In what seemed to be some sort of tradition there were what looked like chestnuts on top of the cake, one for each female member of our party, and the guy who brought the cake proceeded to pick them up one at a time with a fork and feed them to the girls. Boys could feed themselves, and in fact the cake was delicious.
This sort of thing is certainly yet another culture shock, but a nice one nonetheless. If a stranger brought you cake in the Netherlands (or Scotland), would you eat it? Probably not, but then this is hardly worth thinking about because it wouldn’t happen in the first place.
