Moderator: Emre KOYUNCUOĞLU- Theatre Director, Turkey
Osman OKKAN- WDR, West German Radio, Turkish-German Culture Forum Member, Germany
Güldem DURMAZ- Film Director, Belgium
Handan BÖRÜTEÇENE- Visual Artist, Turkey-France
Stine JENSEN- Literature Theorist and Philosopher, Holland
Emre KOYUNCUOĞLU- Welcome to our panel. Here, we will in general sense discuss the status of immigrants -who have chosen Europe for living and as a place for creation- in European art production, exchange and consumption within the scope of the immigration policies of European countries. To this effect, we will mobilize different points of view and different examples. I believe it necessary to review the relationships that are formed naturally due to immigration in the last 40-50 years and to learn from their exemplifications, to discuss present point of views and also maybe reciprocal prejudices, in a forum where cultural and artistic relations with Europe is under discussion and where the possibility of future alliances is treated.
We could roughly distinguish two profiles of Turks engaged in artistic creation in Europe: the first one which constitutes the majority are those who immigrated from our country to have a new life in Europe and who are called the “third generation of European Turks” in the field of artistic creation, children of immigrants directly affected by the immigration policies of Europe and the art they produce and present. The other one is the production of those “urban” artists bearing the character of an international artist who chooses to create in Europe and all around the world, -in our panel those who prefer European cities or Istanbul are the case- for their own art field and the experiences of these artists in Europe during the course of their artistic creation. We could approach the subject from these two realms. There are junctions in between the two realms, of course.
After a brief definition of the domains of our speakers, I would like to invite WDR programmer and writer Osman Okkan who has rendered services in the field of culture in Germany for years and who is quite experienced in that field. He is also a member of the Turkish-German Cultural Forum, a journalist, TV host and the founder of many peace and culture initiatives.
Osman OKKAN- First of all, I would like to congratulate my colleagues who organized this meeting. For someone who has closely observed Turkish-European cultural relations for a pretty long period of nearly forty years from the aspect of media, the handling of these topics in this framework principally by young volunteers has a special meaning.
Turkish-German Cultural Forum is a result of an initiative formed in the 80’s by culture and media employees, the majority of them being from Germany. It is a known fact to all of us that the cultural baggage introduced by our compatriots who had to immigrate to Europe is limited to folkloric elements.
However, those who are responsible for the ignorance in Europe about the world of culture and art in Turkey -which is constituted of various multicolored elements due to its historical texture, different ethnical and religious origins- are not our immigrant workers.
The effort to impose the self-publicity policies of Turkey driven by state or governmental organizations as a cultural policy via official channels, embassies and consulates is luckily long out of agenda.
Another factor accentuated with the advent of foreign workers in Europe is what is from time to time called “socioculture”, that is to say a conception which reduces cultural and artistic activities of the countries of which the immigrants come from to the level of a welfare work in the city neighborhoods of foreign majority.
The Cultural Forum intended to stand against these tendencies in Germany with the intervention of German and foreign artists. These efforts were supported to a great extent by Günter Grass and Yaşar Kemal undertaking the role of the Honorary President and the presence of respectful names in various agencies.
In the year 1987, the Turkey-Greece peace attempt that blossomed during the first European concert series by Mikis Theodorakis and Zülfü Livaneli and activities carried out in cooperation with the European Secretary and other international organizations caused the Culture Forum an exemplary identity. In the following years, forums with parallel goals in Nuremberg and Stuttgart with their high-level work were received with great enthusiasm.
In 1993, the cultural congress of Frankfurt with the participation of over three hundred experts in culture and art from Turkey and Europe, the panel discussion organized in 1995 together with the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Istanbul with the presence of personalities such as Yaşar Kemal, Aziz Nesin, Orhan Pamuk, Mahmut Tali Öngören and Viktor Böll and the series of seminars we organized in Cologne the same year in July under the title “Cultural Fortune” with a significant participation from Turkey, were meetings where the guiding principles for the forum were defined.
The presence of about three million people of Turkish origin in Europe is a reality we have to face today. It is another fact that, despite this great number, the projection of cultural and artistic milieus in Turkey does not reflect upon Europe.
The Japanese minority in Europe with a population not over a few dozens of thousands, a small number of immigrants coming from our neighbor Greece if you like, have a cultural projection on Europe that is much more important when compared with ours and this should give us very instructive clues I guess.
The Cultural Forum also gives importance to scientific research and symposiums besides culture and art. These activities which concern to a great extent culture and media policies focus on the problems confronted by multicultural societies.
We could summarize some of the the functioning fields of the Forum with a few examples:
• Congresses, seminars, symposiums and panel discussions in German and European level handling the topics of culture, art and media;
• Education programs about Turkey and visits to Turkey prepared for journalists of the press, radio and television;
• Meetings, seminars and activities treating the issue of a peaceful togetherness of ethnical and religious communities within the cultural diversity of Turkey;
• Documentary and movie festivals with mainly Turkish, Greek and Mediterranean films;
• Support to documentary and movie projects: in this domain, we could enumerate the Nazım Hikmet, Aziz Nesin, Yaşar Kemal movies prepared for WDR and ARTE which also entered the school education programs and the nocturnal programs reserved to Turkey on the European cultural channel ARTE;
• Reading and discussion meetings with the participation of numerous writers and thinkers from Turkey, Greece and Cyprus such as Ahmet Altan, Füruzan, Ümit Kıvanç, Niyazi Kızılyürek, Mario Levi, Dido Sotiriou, Vedat Türkali, Neşe Yaşın;
• Exhibitions and meetings organized once more with the participation of numerous artists from Turkey, Greece and Cyprus in the field of plastic arts. For instance, we could cite amongst these “The Signs of the City- Contemporary Art in Turkey” organized in the Bonn Museum of Art in 2001 and the exhibition “Modern Art in Greece and Turkey” realized in Cologne-Leverkusen, Istanbul (Saint Irene) and in the Thessalonica Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004;
• Concerts we organized in metropolitan cities in several regions of Germany, particularly in Cologne and Berlin as well as in Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam;
• Internet projects developed the last years for teenagers, the first example of which was realized under the portal www.cafeterra.de which aim at presenting cultural and artistic contents to computer-loving teenagers in the virtual environment by overcoming linguistic obstacles.
In the meantime, we owe grateful thanks to institutions such as the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts and the Heinrich Böll Foundation with which we work together while organizing some of our activities and to Ms. Beral Madra and Nilüfer Sülüner who always gave us their personal support.
The theme of this panel, “The effects of the immigration policies of European countries on the process of artistic creation” is a very important topic for artists, all people working in the field of arts, art and culture actors, operators and managers alike. It is very important to benefit from the opportunities and funds of EU member states. We have to carry these out much more systematically.
I wish to mention once more the topic of language while it has previously been treated in this meeting. For sure, we have to obliterate the problem of language within Turkey and from the cultural and artistic relations between Turkey and European countries. We are well aware of the fact that this is a very difficult process and that speaking a foreign language is a very important factor still creating an obstacle in our relations with Europe.
Virtual environment gives us great possibilities for learning the necessary language to surmount at least the bureaucratic obstacles while benefiting from the sources of EU allocated not only in cultural fields, but also in translation, in media. Needless to say that, the developing translation technologies will never equal the high merits of our colleagues engaged in simultaneous translation. Nevertheless, if we want to improve international relations in this field, we have to remove the linguistic obstacle from the 21st century Europe.
On the other hand, if we are really willing to attain the pinnacle of modern culture and since we accept that every language on earth represents a cultural accumulation or a richness, we have to give the equal chances to each one of those languages. A country such as Turkey where different cultures and different languages coexist presents rich opportunities also from this perspective. Only when we will be able to consider these opportunities not as a threat but as a veritable cultural accumulation shall we be assured that our language too will obtain a more humanistic, more respected status in the world.
Short before his death, at the beginning of the 90’s, German playwright Heiner Mueller answering in an interview published in the magazine Spiegel the question “Are you optimistic about the future of European culture, art and literature?” said, “Here, you have to consider that fraction of the society which is considered to be marginal and in particular the communities formed by those people we brought over as foreign laborers and the new generations who grow among them”.
In that period Fatih Akın was not known in Germany, moreover people like Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun Zaimoğlu were not around, but writers such as Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi were renowned in England, writers and some musicians of foreign origin had widespread fame throughout Europe.
Heiner Mueller knew that the settled cultural milieu of Europe could only be accelerated with the advent of people coming from different cultural traditions. Even though this is a known fact as far as the history of culture is concerned, this observation is an important one for present-day Europe. Although political and administrative surveillance have intensified due to the economical conjuncture, communities of immigrant origin now settled in Europe accelerate the cultural and artistic milieu since a very long time. The names I cited are but a small example of these, we can surely add more.
The projection of immigrant policies on the field of culture applied by European countries housing an important immigrant population is directly connected with this fact. Let us make a brief statement: compared to Turkey the percentage of the budget these countries attribute to culture is certainly higher, but we have to reply negatively to the question whether people of immigrant origin in these countries can claim, benefit from these resources and funds in equal amount.
This is due to several reasons, of course. Due to reasons such as education, traditional motives, the number of individuals interested in culture and art is very limited amongst these immigrant groups who were initially invited but later settled in a way that was considered to be unpleasant by their hosts. Their number is even less than that in their own countries. For that reason, their lack of direct participation in the cultural and artistic life is a fact we previously mentioned. Surveys in the field of education conducted in several European countries in the last years also affirm that lower-class kids who are primarily of immigrant origin are widely condemned to failure. One of the European countries where this discrepancy is at a maximum degree is Germany.
That’s why, we do not consider it strange that immigrant culture and art is supported by a rather depreciatory fund we call “socioculture”, actually aiming the folkloric level. In fact, we do find it awkward and we do stand against it, but in the public opinion we largely accept somehow the using of these “socioculture” funds as funds for the art and culture of these masses. Only activities of a certain level of culture and art which we call “high culture” have the chance to benefit from ordinary cultural funds.
This has several consequences. In a country such as Germany which has a federative structure in spite of its external dominant centralist image, the supporting of culture not on a national level but on the level of federal states and municipalities generates different consequences as regards the accessibility of cultural funds for immigrant communities, some of them being positive, some negative. However, the decentralized, federative structure enables the application for some cultural initiatives in alternative federal states and gives the chance to benefit from their funds, then at least in some regions, the carrying out of cultural activities is made possible.
I would like to conclude my speech with two concrete examples regarding cultural richness. WDR Radio-Television Institution with its headquarters in Cologne where I work is an autonomous public broadcasting institution. However, the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia where it is located has a status similar to that of Istanbul in Turkey as regards its economy and population. For that reason, WDR has the position of the biggest radio-television institution not only of Germany but also of Europe alongside with BBC. In this region, since the arrival of immigrant workers in Germany in 1964, the WDR broadcasts programs in their native tongues.
These broadcasts started in 1964 with the objective of offering the settled immigrants social services besides news and music broadcasts and it was conceived to shield them against the influence of communist radios.
Nevertheless, in the last years there has been such a progress that ten years ago WDR consecrated a whole channel called “the European Radio” to these languages 24 hours a day. This means that in these 24 hours, besides broadcasts in Turkish at certain hours of the day, you can also listen to programs in Italian, Spanish, Greek, Serbian, Bosnian, Zaza and Kurmanchi. It also makes arrangements with democratic media institutions from these countries. For instance, one night we broadcast a music program of Açık Radyo from Istanbul, another night you can listen to a music program from Catalonia, Barcelona.
These attempts by WDR were subject to many criticisms in the beginning, but it was also received as a token of respect to minorities living in its own country by at least recognizing them. Today, “the European Radio” is an indispensable and outstanding example of radio production imitated in several other regions of Germany.
Presumably, we too have to reflect on how we could supply these opportunities to our own citizens within the limits of our capacities. It is a known fact that the importance of a radio-television institution is not only the diffusion of culture. It is also an institution enabling the creation of culture. If we were to reconsider the afore-mentioned federal state, WDR is the biggest cultural sponsor of the state where it is located; it is the institution that gives the most support to not only music and literature through its broadcasts but also to plastic arts through organizing exhibitions.
A second example is the step taken long after by a Europe delivered from the yoke of fascism on May 8th 1945 and assumed to be founded over again: the joint foundation of ARTE as a European Cultural Television channel by two century-long ferocious enemies of the Second World War, Germany and France. You know ARTE TV started as a French-German cooperation. Now, it is being broadcasted in Italy, Spain and Poland as packet programs. Packet broadcasts of daily ARTE programs at variable lengths are being broadcasted in these countries in their languages.
Obviously, ARTE is not a channel with a rating reaching 20 or 15 % because it focuses on art and culture, but it is a known reference in the world of television. The most successful, most outstanding broadcasts, the most important culture and art events, promising projects and also young artists are being introduced on that channel and ARTE is considered to be one of the world’s most prestigious TV broadcasting institutions in that respect.
As the Cultural Forum, we think that we have to produce constructive and creative solutions for the cultural relations between Turkey and Europe also in this field. We all know that Turkey concurrently is going through a revolution in the field of telecommunications. Today, broadcasts in Turkey are transmitted using the latest technologies and of course, Turkey is not the only country where the most miserable programs are made using these high technologies.
Moreover, like in all countries where the reading and writing habits are underdeveloped, TV delirium reaches striking dimensions. Lately, it was said that together with local transmitters there are over 400 TV channels in Turkey.
We believe that in near future also ARTE should figure amongst this increasing number of digital bouquets. By surmounting the afore-mentioned linguistic obstacle, ARTE could and should be introduced in Turkish to young artists and those working in the cultural sector in Turkey. There are serious efforts made to this effect, we as the Cultural Forum consider the supporting of these activities to be a very important task vis-à-vis young generations. Accordingly, we presume that the encounter of our compatriots residing here and in particular young people interested in culture and art with this program will be an important step in terms of enabling continuous cultural communication with Europe and promoting self-development. We hope that we will not withhold mutual support from one another. Thank you very much.
Emre KOYUNCUOĞLU- Thank you very much. In fact, so much information and so many topics that we would like to discuss have been conveyed one after the other that I would like to underline some of them once again for future discussion.
Mr. Osman mentioned that setting off from the consideration of how far Europe progressed on the equity of democratic rights, we have to apply the same thought to minorities living in our own country; we thus have to think bilaterally. He also stated that the conflict of cultures creates a novel culture and that this conflict is one of the most important motor forces of culture. He mentioned that in the cultural relationship with 21th century Europe, language and translation should no longer be an obstacle, that this should be taken into account and he added that translations should increase. Moreover, he referred to important point from the interview of Heiner Müller in the magazine Spiegel: this latter mentioned that new cultural proposals are to come from the immigrant population and that from now on, people should be attentive to this. He also brought up certain points while talking about the projection of immigrant policies on culture and art. The most important of them was the low percentage of immigrants interested in culture and art and the fact that support came from socioculture and folkloric funds instead of high culture, regular culture funds. Afterwards, he talked about WDR, ARTE and realms of art in high-quality media where a common language can be constructed in the field of culture. Thank you.
Now, I invite our second speaker to deliver her speech. Gülden Durmaz is a film director born in France who lives currently in Belgium. She will talk to us about her bicultural, bilingual life experience and the projection of this richness in her artistic production.
Güldem DURMAZ- Thank you. It will be quite interesting. I do speak Turkish, but since I believe my vocabulary to be limited, I will deliver today’s speech in English.
When I read the title of this conference, it seemed a very huge subject to me. And I think that not to spread myself in this subject, I needed to take myself as an object of study. So, I’m beginning by a little trajectory which is mine. My parents are Turkish. They went to France, Paris in 1970. One year after I was born there. My first mother language was Turkish and after a while because of school, French became dominant. Also at school we practiced with all the family together in French. So, this is the beginning of a schizophrenia. This schizophrenia is still continuing because now I live in Brussels, Belgium. It’s been now 5-6 years. But Brussels is really near Paris, it’s like Bursa-İstanbul.
My name is Güldem, when I had to present myself as anybody, people asked me “Wow, Güldem is a beautiful name, where do you come from? Are you Dutch?” Thanks God Euro exists now because of the money. You know in Holland they use to have this Gulden money so now thanks God the Euro exists. And I said “No, I’m not Dutch.” “Where are you from?” I say “Turkey” “Oh Turkey! This is a nice name, where is Turkey in Africa?” I was 8-9 years old. I used to come every year to Turkey. I said “OK, I think Turkey is not in Africa”.
So, it was for me the beginning of a need to know my origins because it was a part of my identity in the end. I think we touch a very important point which is the question of identity. I think people like me are quite in a strange position. In French there is this famous expression which says to have your back on two chairs, “être assis sur deux chaises”, which is not very comfortable. So, I think many years after that, I don’t need to choose one chair or another in fact. If I want I can sit anywhere. Even if sometimes people try to push you on one chair or another, you have to be careful not to obey to their demand. But these people who expect some kind of position or an image from you, they are not bad people or there isn’t any Machiavellism. There is only ignorance which is also very dangerous. It’s important to know this I think. What we can do against ignorance is to try not to be ignorant ourselves I think.
The point I want to come to is: I’m not only an immigrant or immigrants’ child. Because if I think like that, it’s only a part of me, it’s only an incomplete identity. I’m not only a woman, I’m not only an artist, I’m not only a Turkish person, I’m not only a French born person, I’m not only a future mother at the same time. So, I’m everything; these things constitute my personality, my identity. And at the same time, as I’m trying to compose with all these elements, I’m not representing France, I’m not representing Belgium and I’m not representing Turkey. And for me –now we come to art- what is very important is that we have to understand sociology as only one point of view upon the world or upon art, but sociology doesn’t make art. I will come to this after, with a small anecdote.
Two days before there was this film director, Eddy Terstall. He said that he was giving I think script lessons and the first thing he was saying to his students, as a beginning of a creation process, was to find what are my concerns. I totally agree with him because to carry a movie from the beginning to the end, making your own way, it’s easier if you talk about your concerns without being trapped in a commercial system or even in some kind of false good consciousness. I was saying before some people were expecting some image from me; it means also when I write movies, my concerns can be my inspiration on Turkey but it may also be other things. But sometimes people expect from me, anyone in production for instance, they expect from me that I speak about immigrancy, but it’s not my concern. So, if I do that, I’m not doing art because it’s not my concern.
I have an example for that. My first movie –I can talk to you about this because it was shown here- it’s called Şoför, it was my first short movie. When I wrote it first, there is the woman character which is some kind of “blank” character. I wanted her to be a bit abstract. And some people asked me to tell about “How difficult it is to be a woman in Turkey”. I don’t live in Turkey, I don’t know how difficult it is to live as a woman in Turkey. And by this question, I can see a whole landscape of prejudice. This was quite interesting.
I ask myself, what do I do? I need money to make this movie. Maybe I can try to think about that but not put it in the movie. It helped me not to fall into clichés in fact. So, it wasn’t so negative in the end. And also with this first movie it was quite important for me to respect several things: for instance, we worked with natural light and also in several places in Istanbul. And I wanted in the editing, the trajectory to be fluid. I mean I wanted that Turkish people, especially people living in İstanbul wouldn’t be shocked by “they walk in Beşiktaş and then they turn and by magic they are in Galatasaray” which is not right I think.
Just to finish, one more thing. My last experience was with a refugee center in Brussels and I was in the other position; I was working with new immigrants, people who don’t have their papers. And what I’ve learnt with them was that in 30 years the frontiers have really changed. In my parents’ time, we had the chance to circulate. I have a passport that helps me to go everywhere in the world quite easily. And I think I’m very lucky for that.
Working with these people was also important because I tried to pay more attention to the artistic work with them, but unfortunately there is often this kind of documentary approach in such workshops, that can become linked with some kind of militant process, which I think is also a risk because the movie becomes more manipulated, more politic. So, I don’t really agree with that. I think it is far from an artistic, aesthetic project. I think it’s important for us to explore our origins without being fanatics, with curiosity, and only to continue our travel. Thank you.
Emre KOYUNCUOĞLU- Thank you. Güldem talked to us about her experiences, about the way in which her identity formed, about the fact that she is sitting on two different chairs and that she would never prefer one to the other as she will continue her existence on both of them. Now, I will try to speed up. Handan Borüteçene, an international artist who lives in Istanbul and in Paris. She wanted us to give priority to these pieces of information when introducing her; she will approach the topic from the perspective of a visual artist working in two cities.
Handan BÖRÜTEÇENE- Good day. Thank you very much, you are all here. Today, we are face to face with one of world’s most complicated issues. Our title is “the immigrant problem” as said by our moderator. We all know Diogenes. He lived on the Northern coast of Turkey in the Black Sea region in a small city named Sinope, in fact one of his fellow countrymen is among us: Melih Görgün. We all are his fellow countrymen. He lived in the time of Alexander the Great in the 1st century BC. Most of the world knows him by the extraordinary sentence he pronounced before Alexander: “Stand out of my sunlight”. Yet, he has something more valuable. The injustice committed to Diogenes is comparable to reducing Leonardo da Vinci to his Mona Lisa painting, for he pronounced a sentence much more important than that one. They ask him “Who are you, where do you come from?” He replies “I’m a cosmopolitan”. As far as history informs us, the concept “cosmopolitan” has been used first by Diogenes. In the meantime, we have understood this to be a utopia. It has remained a concept belonging to the philosophical sect of Cynics of which Diogenes is a part of. They have thus created a utopic concept long before Thomas More. However many continents, languages, races and cultures there might be on Earth, amongst human beings there has surely been people who bear this concept in their mind and bring it into play. If they didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be possible for us to come together here today.
Now, all of the cosmos and the Earth is founded on a duality: there is good, there is evil; there is day, there is night. How are we to keep them in balance? This is the question. The essential is to be able to organize the good because the evil is very proficient in self-organization.
This was my introduction. Since I haven’t been able to follow all of the speeches, we will have to make a brief inventory of subjects relating to immigrants in order to assemble the realities we are facing today although they might have been mentioned in previous speeches.
In the 1960’s, there has been a great flux of immigrant workers from Turkey to Europe. After the democracy and peace process started, some developed countries in Europe needed young people for many lost their lives in the Second World War. Whereas as of 1950’s, Turkey was no longer administered by dynamic, self confident governments and ideas determined to take all necessary modernistic actions all around Turkey for the progress of the country as in the first years of the Republic. Turkey’s current condition began to be manifested in the 50’s and ten years later this story began. Hundreds and thousands of families and single men and women from let’s say Pötürge in Malatya, Digor in Kars, from whichever village of Diyarbakır have been put in trains without their families and sent from where they came from, without having visited even once the town centre of their provinces, not to mention cities like Ankara, Istanbul or Izmir, in a completely disorganized, unplanned fashion. In the concert today, they mentioned the languages shown to be spoken at every census – most of them did not know how to speak Turkish. Moreover, they knew nothing about urban life, theatre did not have any place in their lives, nor did cinema and art exhibitions; in brief, there was nothing in their lives. They went over there. After this departure, the government of the Republic of Turkey treated them as did the stork her chick she threw out of the nest. It never asked them “How are things over there? Are you O.K.? What are you doing? What do you eat and what do you drink?” What interested them was the foreign exchange they brought. I know that imams have been sent. In the first years, a few Turkish teachers were also sent, let Osman Okkan correct me if I’m mistaken. The government did not make any sound cultural investment either.
Now, I will move on a little faster, but in the meantime something else happened: Europeans knew Turks via these immigrants. I am talking about the people, not the lettered intellectuals. They said “Who are Turks? Here they are, these are Turks”. It is not their fault and today the fault is not ours either. However, I know that in the meantime nothing has been done in order to close this gap, to improve the system of education, to offer them language courses in the countries they went to, to help them engage in urbanization and cultural activities like urban citizens do. And what was done was so minimal that it can easily be ignored. Nevertheless, the forthcoming generations certainly have been very different because they were born there and grew up there. Güldem talked about a wonderful testimony on this issue. I wish to pay tribute to the short film called “Speechless” by Mehmet Kurtuluş, which we watched yesterday. It was the most striking example of the issues I mentioned. I found it to be a very successful piece of work. Besides, as of the 70’s and the 80’s, the Turkey’s lettered population also moved to Europe, but they did not go as immigrants; they were university graduates or graduates from foreign language schools here in Turkey who wanted to study at universities abroad. These were different people. There is one thing I hear very often when I go to Europe or when these people come back to Istanbul “They were surprised when I told them I was a Turk”. This was even seen as a reason to boast off about. As if we were not one of them. It was a remarkable example which we also saw in the short film of yesterday. It was either a question of applying an assimilation policy imposing them to join them and forget their mother tongue which was a possible choice or a question of letting two cultures coexist in parallel.
In social matters especially, an augmenting number of crises occurred as years went by. These people who immigrated from different regions of Turkey to different places of Europe found themselves cut off from Turkey. In the meantime, provincial towns like Pötürge and Digor underwent a development. You might consider this development to be awry or upright, but especially after the 80’s, the dynamics of Turkey, its chaotic socio-political and economic structure transformed these towns and villages as well. However, these people travel over thousands of kilometres and obstinately come back to Turkey for their vacations, like salmons that move upstream to lay their eggs and each time they come back, they are unable to recognize their hometowns because the elderly, the middle-ages, their cousins and aunts have all changed. Nevertheless, as they return, they do take along considerable amounts of tarhana (a soup preparation of dried curds and flour), rice and pounded wheat; this is quite an unbelievable thing, of course.
However, the new generation is very different. Now, my closest acquaintance with these people has been in France where I spent half of my life. For that reason, I could only give examples from France, Osman having already talked about Germany. In France, there are many serious studies carried out concerning immigrants by diverse ministries and local administrations. However, as Osman already mentioned, these do not go beyond folkloric dimensions and never correspond to high forms of art. Here, there is an orientalist perspective, they want to see you in your own culture. As we often say among ourselves: “Say! They still see us wearing fez. They want to see us yet marbling variegated paper with our folkloric costumes.”
And now, the heart of the matter: How does the Turkish Republic who has turned away from the labourers it sent abroad not understand when today certain nations hold a referendum against the accession of Turkey to the EU? They are surprised. They say “Why don’t they want us, then?” and again they say “We are not like them, we have shopping malls; there is a shopping mall even in Konya and Diyarbakır. We wear mini-skirts. Don’t you see we also have jazz concerts. How come you don’t know us?” What has Turkey given to Europe to ask something in return from those nations? I am not talking about political relations. What kind of a relationship has Turkey established with their nations?
Since a very long time, Turkey was afraid that the world would enter through the door, like certain school establishments still do. If it were not to the Istanbul Biennial, would we have produced art with such a force in Turkey? Could this art have found its place in school establishments? Would we, the artists who produce contemporary art in Turkey – I underline this particularly, for they are the ones who succeeded in this- be able to speak simultaneously the same language as rest of the world? No, it wouldn’t be the case because this was a civil enterprise.
Now, if we were to resume: Today Turkey is not involved in any cultural structures within France. In the heart of Paris, there is a huge Cité Universitaire. These are dorms founded to accommodate young people coming from their countries to study university. Believe it or not, Armenia has a dorm therein; Iran has one, Tunisia has one, every country you can think about has a dorm there, except Turkey. There is also the Cité Internationale des Arts, it is a respected institution founded after the Second World War. It is conceived for artists from all around the world to come and engage in creative activities in studios and thus contribute to the world of art. Every country has a studio there and provides a certain contribution fee, but Turkey doesn’t even have a single studio there. At this point, there is something I wish to say: Tunisia has one on the door of which is inscribed “Habib Burgiba Studio”. I invite you to remember Habib Burgiba; he is a statesman who follows the example of Ataturk.
If you don’t know it already, let me tell you this too; Turkey is represented through three big embassies in Paris: the Embassy of Turkey we all know about, the Embassy of OECD and the Embassy of UNESCO. Up to this day, I haven’t witnessed a single occasion where the Embassy of UNESCO organized a cultural activity, although you all know the activity field of UNESCO. As far as Turkish policy is concerned, I would like to ask the following question: Which country’s capital is Ankara? In my opinion, it can’t be Turkey’s because if it were, it would be well informed about Turkey and its people. It is a capital for its own sake and during my personal conversations with most of the UNESCO ambassadors, they have said especially in the years before the 90’s: “To speak the truth, we have not come here to deal with culture, the state wants us to play the police. That is to say, don’t ask us too many questions.” Thankfully, Turkey has surpassed all this since the last ten years, but we have gone through these.
Now, we have a cultural attaché in Paris. When one is a part of a certain cycle of intellectuals with a certain leftist view, s/he has expectations whenever a left-wing political party comes to power in Ankara within the scope of a certain left-oriented worldview. He expects more tolerant, more democratic acts speaking the language of modernity. However, Fikri Sağlar became the Minister of Culture and nominated a cultural attaché to Paris after long years. The Cultural Attaché was the CHP Deputy of Mersin who was the brother of the mayor of Taşucu and a teacher working in the Taşucu Municapility junior high-school. Now, you will say: can’t a high-school French teacher become a Cultural Attaché? I don’t tend to make distinction of this kind, everything is possible as long as the person has the capacity. However, this person was unfortunately someone who said “Ne quittez pas” and gave the phone to his secretary when you called him to speak, he even didn’t know Paris at all.
Now, if we take a look at Paris: it is a city where all countries have a cultural centre. Here exhibitions, concerts and literary discussions are in abundance. Turkey has none. Turkey has only one office of tourism on the Champs-Elysées. From time to time, they try to put through bad exhibitions. The place is always crowded with policemen and the like. Are there not any civil attempts? Yes, there are two. For instance, there is an association called Elele which does its best to organize activities and is the only association trying to do something for Turkish immigrants. Besides this, there is the Centre Culturel Anatolien. If I may put it this way, they exert their efforts quite naively. However, let me say that I do find their efforts useful.
Besides this, French municipalities organize days and weeks for immigrant communities not only from Turkey but also from other countries. However, those really don’t include examples of high art. They remain within the limits of the view of the regional municipality, their character is mostly folkloric.
Now, let us come to the problem of art. Güldem said before: “I am not an immigrant”. Yes, I think like Diogenes anyway; I am a world citizen. I am not an immigrant in France or anywhere else on Earth. As regards one’s condition in France as a foreigner from a country like Turkey; there are certain procedures for obtaining a residence permit. If I am an artist, the formal procedure that lies ahead of me is to become a member of the Masion des artistes. You hand in your file; they accept the file. Afterwards, you obtain the status of a professionel libéral. Your tax dues, social security insurance is on your responsibility and your life goes on like that of other artists. As long as you follow this method, you are a part of the network and no one asks you to paint tulips instead. This kind of an experience is inconceivable in France. You really perform your work and the conditions are highly democratic. If you work hard, it is not possible to face such discriminations. Therefore, I would like to underline this meticulously: an artist intimately willing to create can create under all circumstances, no matter where s/he is; in France, Nicaragua, Turkey or elsewhere. Everywhere he produces art is a centre. No one can change this fact. As far as we are concerned, the sole issue we can discuss under the title “Turkish-European cultural relations” is not art itself, but what kind of a communication it has to be involved with. For that reason, the process of artistic creation mentioned in our title does not comprise this topic. Here, I have a commentary, an opposite stance. The afore-mentioned elements do not alter the content of art; the artist always creates what he has to. There are processes of intake, but this is another issue. The essential question is whether the communication is healthy.
I have directed a criticism against Turkey; to what extent they take themselves out? Well then, a second question to Europe: how often do they come here? And how do they see Turkey? If you look at Turkey through orientalist and exotic binoculars, you cannot understand what is going on in Turkey. While Osman lives there since a very long time, he has been able to ask these questions with complacency, but I too have a thing to tell him. There is an important question I want to ask today on the European Democracy Day, the 8th of May. Europe leads very important policies about minorities in general, but the problems about immigrants, that is to say the minorities within, are immense. They veil their own problems and constantly try to bring into question similar questions relating to Turkey. What can France say about the language of Breton? Today, no one speaks Breton. When we expect an art exhibition from France, do we ever say: “Say? Are there Bretons amongst the artists in the exhibition?” We have never asked such a question. We never asked: “Are there Catholics amongst them? Members of the Eastern Orthodox Church or Protestants?” and we never will. Turkey has a profound culture inscribed in its genes in this respect. Europe is completely uninformed about this. Europe’s outlook on this subject through these glasses surprises us because they consider that in Turkey there are minorities among which there are also Kurds – I mean I leave the discussion of “the ones talking Kurdish are a minority or not” out- and there are such things as Kurdish art, Armenian art… and they thus make a discrimination. They consider that Turkey is a mosaic in which there are numerous ethnical groups plus Turks. Now, that is a great mistake. We all are Turks owing to the sole fact that we speak Turkish. In other words, we all come from incredibly mixed origins. If we were to consider my family or anyone of our families, we see but Circassians, Lazes, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks… We are mixed. Whether you call this assimilation or anything else, there is a fact widely forgotten by Europe: we are a crossbred, we all come from different origins although this enormous population constituted of this amalgam is called Turks. It is as if those who create art and culture in Turkey are supplied with considerable opportunities of a mind-blowing wealth society and these opportunities are not offered to Kurdish or Armenian artists… See here! Do we benefit from human rights? How come Europe forgets this generality? What we want from Turkey is this, and I would like to speak it out loud, very loud: we want all of it for all of us. Yet we can’t make Europe understand this basic fact. When they call for exhibitions from us, they want to see us divided. This is not what we experience. Frankly speaking, there is no such thing. If there is, let us discuss it. In other words, racism is dictated to Turkey. Let us see this from this point of view and discuss it this way, please. We will carry on with questions.
Emre KOYUNCUOĞLU- Of course, Ms. Börüteçene brought up an issue open to a lot of questions and discussion. We really have to discuss this together. Reserving questions on this subject for the section where we will hold a debate with our audience, I move on to our next speaker by making an introduction to the speech he will deliver using one of Ms. Börüteçene’s questions: “What has Turkey given to Europe?”. Stine Jensen is a Dutch literary critique, writer, theorist and philosopher at the same time. There is an issue he wished to treat in particular: “Turkish butterflies”. This is a novel written by Stine Jensen. Using his personal experience and his literary talents as a journalist he tries to impart in this novel differences in the understanding of love in two cultures. Stine Jensen will begin her speech precisely from this starting point, I believe.
Stine JENSEN- It is always a little bit difficult to be the last speaker. So, I decided to entertain you with a story first and this is a story about love. It’s the love between a German woman called Lene and a Turkish man named Ahmet. So, here is the story of love. Relax, close your eyes and imagine a lovely summer in 2004, when a young German woman named Lene went on a holiday to the west-coast of Turkey. She was not really a beach-type, let alone a party girl, but she had decided that she was in need of a change. But as one of her female friends happened to work in a travel agency, she decided she was in for the unknown and together they booked a two week all-in holiday to Antalya.
So it goes, and so they went, and relaxed on the beach and enjoyed the sun and Turkish food in the excellent restaurants. On one of those breezy summer evenings, a Turkish waiter paid special attention to their table. “It was love at the first sight”, Lene would later tell her friends. “I fell in love the moment he laid his eyes on me”. They started talking when he got off work, and they did have slight communication problems. He barely spoke a word of German and her Turkish was limited to ordering a cup of coffee – but the chemistry was there and there was the non-verbal language they shared. Lene decided there was nothing wrong with a holiday-romance, but her friend was less excited: “You be careful, he might just want a visa for Europe!” However, Lene was head over heels. Whether he wanted a visa or not, at that point she didn’t care. She wanted to be with Ahmet, who romanced her in a way that a German man never had: he paid for all her drinks and presented her with small gifts, such as a bracelet and a silk skirt and told her over and over again with enormous passion in his voice how beautiful she was.
When the holiday ended, Lene left with sadness in her heart back for Berlin, Germany. However, in times of sms, msn messenger and all other border bridging technologies, the holiday love could be extended somewhat longer. Lene dived into Turkish dictionaries, bought several teach-yourself-Turkish books, and dreamed about a possible future with Ahmet, despite further warnings of her environment. “You be careful, girl”, one of her friends said, “have you checked the black list yet?”
The black list? She enquired.
On the Internet, there was a community of German women dating Turkish men and on it, a black list of barman, animateurs, beach boys and others: those guys women should watch out for, as these men were only after money and visa to Europe. Lene, who knew her classics and had read her share of Edward Said, was quite aware of possible racist “orientalism” -the term coined to describe the process of considering the east as one unit- she did, with fear in her heart, check that list to see if Ahmet was on it….
What she didn’t know, was, that, in the mean time, Ahmet, was doing the same in Antalya. He had in fact, never romanced a German woman before, and was surfing the Internet to learn more about Germany and asking questions to his male Turkish friends about Germany, and the female kind living there especially. Was it true what he had heard about western women, namely that they were easy going, had lose and independent lifestyles, they were never a virgin, yet had money, and were definitely not a serious options for marriage. Ahmet was no intellectual and didn’t know that there was a name invented for his reflexive condition: Occidentalism, the term coined by the philosopher Avishai Margalit for the stereotypic imaging of the West as the centre of impiety, immorality, individualism, money and sex.
Let’s leave Ahmet and Lene behind their search engines for a while, as I continue this presentation.
One might consider this relation between two individuals a small microcosmos, or even excellent test case, for the larger discussion on Turkey and the European Union.
This idea, I actually derived from a Turkish television series called Çocuklar Duymasın (Don’t Let the Children Hear), in which a poor, and rather ugly boy watches a beautiful Scandinavian woman on television and comments that he can’t get a girl here in Turkey, but that he would be happy to settle for one of those Scandinavian beauties. ‘Mmm, I see” says his father, ‘then you should first meet the standards of the Copenhagen Criteria” he jokingly adds.
In this case, the television programme self-consciously refers to the European Union. One of the effects of the whole political EU discussion on the artistic creation process has been, however that, whether Turkish artists are happy with it or not, once their artistic work starts travelling towards Europe these days, it will be interpreted as a statement about Turkey and European Union.
Take the case of the German-Turkish director Fatih Akın, for instance. His award-winning motion picture Gegen die Wand tells the love story between Sibel and Cahit, two third-generation German-Turks, who fall in love with each other. When Birol Ünel, the actor who plays Cahit, jokingly announced a German magazine that “the tragic and bloody love-affair and his drunken Bukowski-like character was by no means a recommendation for the Turks to join the European Union” his statement was directly followed by a panel discussion on the same page about whether Turkey should join the EU. Fatih Akın was furious and said that what he had made was a movie about love, not a political pamphlet. There was no way that he, being an artist, would make any compromises and paint a pleasurable and sweet image of Turks just because of the EU discussion.
Akın has a good point. However, I must admit that I too, when analysing and judging cultural artefacts, I am tempted to analyse cultural artefacts on the imagery they use and on the perspective they draw on political issues. When I hear Sertab Erener sing “Every way that I can, I’ll give you all my love” or, I quote, “Oh, what’s the remedy, it’s obvious that you’re checking me, Make it quick for me to get my fix, oh oh”, I find it hard not to think of the European Union and Turkey and to consider her an example for the model of female pleasing. Because, after she won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2003 with Every Way That I Can, she released an album for the European Market with the suggestive title No Boundaries.
This record can easily be interpreted as one continuous attempt to please a European audience: there is a disco beat underneath every eastern sound and she encloses many pictures of herself as either a belly dancer or a harem slave, while she sings the one sentence after the other in which she promised complete surrender and the will to adapt.
One could also argue that political debate also provides plenty of cultural inspiration. Filmmakers, cartoonists, humorists, artists freely use and comically manipulate all stereotypes available – and it is often the image of femininity that plays a role not only in the political debate, but also on a cultural level. Take a look for instance at this cartoon, entitled “To the Turkish bath” by a Belgian cartoonist. Here we have a blond virile looking man with a wild hairdo in the hamam, surrounded by half naked eastern bathing women: “He guys!” he says, “Don’t doubt for a second… Immediately take Turkey on board, I am having such a good time!”
The other view, however, of Turkish women fully covered, is also prevalent. Take a look at the two Dutch ducks Fokke and Sukke, who are quite disappointed to see that the beaches in Turkey are not filled with topless women. This cartoon was made just after the announcement of the Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan in October 2003, that it was allowed for Turkish women to bathe topless. Some interpreted this as another of his symbolic gestures to show Europe how “westernised” Turkey really was.
If one theme has culturally bloomed and profited from the new immigrant policies, it must be intercultural love. In the Netherlands we had a little wave of films and television series that portrayed impossible intercultural love stories, by names such as Fatima and Romeo, in which all cultural conflicts are investigated. Whereas these portrayals depict happy couples, real-life statistics present us with a very bleak picture: less than 5% of the Turkish population finds a partner of Dutch origins – and if they do, 40% ends up in a divorce. In my research, I wanted to bring the statistics to live. In fact, real life love stories proved to have a fictional quality that I could never have imagined. The past year I spoke to many European-Turkish couples about their intercultural relationships. There were stories with happy endings, but some of these love stories I encountered turned out to be even more dramatic than the lovers we meet in Fatih Akın’s Gegen die Wand.
Barriers from real life stops the European-Turkish love-couples from being united: visa problems, choices between family and lover and legislation and immigracy-rules make it difficult to get together. When one realizes however, that last year, approximately 900.000 tourists from the Netherlands visited Turkey, one must start thinking about the political and cultural impact of romances such as the one between Ahmet and Lene from the beginning of my presentation, for the coming years, they will only increase.
One the one hand, I consider these love relations small test cases for the larger political discussion, and, at the same time, the metaphor of love and rejection also prevails in discussions on a macro level about Turkey and the European Union, in which the relation between Turkey and Europe often is represented as a love-affair with difficulties.
Whereas Europe seems to be hesitant to take Turkey on board as a full member of the European Union politically and economically, culturally Turkey has for a long time been considered a member of Europe. Not only does Turkey participate in the Eurovision song context (and has even won it), also it is a member of the educational European Erasmus exchange programme and enters the European Soccer Championship. If you take a recent edition of the Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring, Turkey (and even Marocco, by the way) are located within Europe.
The cultural acceptance sounds wonderful, but also demonstrates that in the hierarchy of values “culture” is clearly considered lower than politics or economy. On the other hand, culture is not something opposed to politics, and more over, to quote Jose Manuel Barosso, the President of the European Committee: “Culture is the key. Economy is very important because it is necessary for good living but culture is what makes life worth living.”
I started this talk with the case of Lene and Ahmet. Lene and Ahmet are not figures of my imagination. They exist, and I left them sitting behind their computers, Lene surfing on the black list of bad barmen in Antalya, and Ahmet, desperately trying to learn something about Europe, Germany and the nature of western woman. I talked to Lene and Ahmet both extensively the past summer.
I am not going to tell you what happened to Lene and Ahmet just now, I let you write the scenarios in your head, and whether you choose an happy ending might, as I have argued, have something to do with how you conceive the larger political, economic and cultural understanding of Turkey and the European Union, and of course if you are by nature, an optimist or a pessimist when it concerns matters of the heart.
The past three years, I have divided my time between Amsterdam and Istanbul to talk to young Europeans and Turks involved in an intercultural love-relationship. My investigation resulted in a book that is part autobiographical, part journalistic fieldwork and part cultural analysis. It is about emigrating Europeans who have lost their hearts to Turkey, Turks who are dreaming of a life in Europe and the difficulties and pleasures of intercultural love. It is forthcoming in Dutch this June and it is entitled Turkse vlinders, Liefde tussen twee culturen (Turkish Butterflies, Love Between Two Cultures). Mind you, butterflies don’t need visa to travel abroad.
Thank you very much for your attention.
Emre KOYUNCUOĞLU- I also thank you very much. A relationship that passes through visas is perhaps already a realtionship with obstacles. If you wish, we can now move on to the discussion part. We can have your questions.
Handan BÖRÜTEÇENE- Thank you. The first thing we have to do is perhaps this: I will go back to our quotation from Diogenes: “Stand out of my sunlight”. In everything we create, in Turkey or abroad, if we managed to do one thing that was to say to the government: “Stand out of our sunlight and we shall take action”. Now, I repeat the same thing as a reply to your question: howsoever you or we might organize it, we can succeed only if we reduce the role of the state to a minimum and set up extensive commissions constituted of civilians and professionals within civil society or governmental organizations. In case we left it to the Cultural Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or -God forbid!- to the Ministry of Culture, it would be a disaster.
Now, I will open a brief parenthesis though one could prolong it at will. On the 17th of December, there was a splendid exhibition from Turkey. Not only from Turkey but there were three great artists, whom France introduced to the world: Daniel Buren, François Morellet and Sarkis in chief with artists from Turkey and Madagascar we set up a big exhibition together. Now, this exhibition was a serious thing, in particular where my work was because it took place in Philippe Villiers’s region where they were holding a campaign against Turkey. However, I stepped on somebody’s foot, I put a rod in someone’s beehive, a “calm” region was mobilized because during the French Revolution this was the zone inhabited by clericalists and royalists while seculars who reclaimed a republic sent over a huge army onto them, giving rise to a horrible civil war and hell broke loose. We knew nothing about this beforehand; Turkey has to take this type of information and details about the countries that bear a negative attitude against its accession so that they can be brought under discussion. Something alike persisted from 1789 to our day. These people reclaim from each new government the recognition of a génocide des franco-français. In other words, they want to impose the civil war as genocide. They are ready to give a serious fight to that effect. Whenever France brings up the issue of Armenian Genocide, these people profit from the occasion to say: “A moment, render us first an account of Vande”, although they are eminently against Turkey and Turks. Now then, although we created this occasion, comfortable that they are in their corner, neither the three ambassadors I mentioned nor the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs payed heed to what was being done for a single second. If they wanted to, they could have turned the situation to their advantage. The exhibition could have been a riposte to many things they claimed because among the participants there were names like Daniel Buren. Nevertheless, this is what happened: the ambassador tried to make good use of October 29th and I heard the following expression in the meeting at the Embassy where they said cheerfully to themselves: “Ha ha, we are going to do all public relations with the Count of Paris. How so nice!” These are the dimensions of the situation. Now, since you are charged with this organization, the sole thing I can suggest is that you establish contact with the right people, right organizations in parallel with our examples. We will do our best to get in contact with you.
Osman OKKAN- I will try to give a brief reply. In fact, I am not sure because your point of view is also valid. If we were to consider today’s Euopean metropols, you observe the continous formation of gettos on the outskirts. This is valid for Paris, for London, for dencentralized regions of Germany such as Berlin and Cologne. The following fact sticks out: like most diasporas, the Turkish diaspora also has a more conservative character than that in his own country. This means that the percentage of conservatists under the people of Turkish origin living abroad –not only in culture and art, but also in politics and religions- outnumber that percentage in Turkey. You can see it for yourselves when you visit those gettos. The women with headscarfs and even sharia overgarments are much more numerous than in Istanbul or even in a village town in Anatolia. This is a fact and because of it, it is not surprizing for these people to stand for the European Union because they have understood that they can live in freedom within the diaspora, inside these gettos, as mentioned on the second day of the forum in Lalumière’s speech I guess. This is of course to the advantage of the status quo over there. In other words, the recognition of their religious freedom brings in a sense also a freedom to create in those gettos.
I will tell something even more horrible: this brings the medial getto for the second, third and fourth generations as well. That is to say, the developing telecommunication technologies lead these people to exclusively follow only broadcasts from the Turkish media through the satellites. Communities, minorities, gettos with completely different mediatic habits and consumptions from those of the rest of the society they live in takes form. There are many views on whether this is a peril or a chance. When seen from this perspective, this view can also be valid of course, but it can also be said that these freedoms can lead to their total abstraction from the society they live in, for they live within the limits of their own culture. However, I think it will be a beneficial solution for both sides if they surmount the obstacle of language in order to partake in an exchange or, in a sense, in a conflict with their surroundings, as mentioned before when talking about culture. This is of course hard to do, but we have to give it a try. If not, these gettos will remain and persist, they will have a continuity of their own. Thank you.
A listener- I will have a brief question for Mr. Okkan. You had mentioned the problem of languages. Do you have any suggestions or thoughts about ethnical languages in the context of a developing world, of becoming a world citizen within the process of accession to the EU? We all know that language is the most important mark of identity, therefore I ask the question about local languages of Turkey other than Turkish… What could we do? Because I didn’t find your answer satisfactory while we can have several languages. This diversity may be our cultural treasure, but wouldn’t it hurt the identity for a person coming out of a small group not to be able to utilize his own language when dealing with minor administrative problems within the EU? What should be done about his own language, his own culture in this course?
Osman OKKAN- Thank you. Certainly this is a very complicated problem, but in a sense, it’s a key problem that would help us resolve European identity. You know that we have to see Europe as a project and, if truth be told, the countries that we consider to be those developed European countries -as Handan also mentioned a minute ago- all have issues they have to settle within. A short while ago, we have seen this in the example of Catalonia in Spain; the same goes for Breton. The conclusions we should draw about Turkey are also similar. In reality, you know that Europe offers specific funds to support these local cultures and languages to that effect. I will try to tell you something very brief because there is a project in course of development on this issue: a system has to be formed, which will enable the speakers of all languages indifferently to direct their questions and receive answers in their mother tongue –and let us include Turkey in this as well, since we see it already or we want to see it as a part of the EU. Short before, I mentioned it briefly, this is outside my domain, but there are activities relating to this within the institutions I work with. Nowadays, a project of this kind is quite facilitated by the utilization of electronic, virtual and Internet environments. In other words, if we could develop programs for these minor languages as well, it will gradually become easier for an artist or a culture operator to receive an answer in his own language to the questions he asks to any given institution. We have to apply this to the world of culture and art and perhaps it should even have a priority because this is the domain most open to communication. I believe we really have to do it. There are serious on-going projects about this. If you ask me whether it would be sufficient, I will reply that I don’t think it to be so, but it is our duty to work it up. It is a duty that one can accomplish with the contributions and support of an association that can see and fight against bilateral deficiencies, such as the European Cultural Association. I think it would be proper to include all of Turkey’s languages in this scope.
