By Mesut Zeyrek, Köln
Read the Turkish original ↗
This article was published in Turkish. The original text, with a German translation, opens in a new tab in the German section of this website.
In a project run by the Working Group for Foreign Children (AAK) in Cologne, a group of children, all of Turkish origin, painted their own world in pictures on the walls of houses. On Etzelstraße, where many Turks live, the children met under the guidance of the teacher, painter and children’s book author Gönül Şen-Menzel for the project “We paint our world the way we like it” and decorated the walls with brushes and paint, covering them with colorful pictures.
Finished in Two and a Half Months
Gönül Şen-Menzel explained that the pictures were created over two months of work by children aged 8 to 12: “The residents themselves call this area a ghetto. We chose this project to show that the young people here can create something too. These walls used to mean little to the children. They scribbled on them at random. But now they protect the place, because there is now a work here that they created themselves. Our children are now proud of this place that they themselves call a ghetto. The children have created their own world here. In the end, a work of art has emerged.”
Caption: In the project of the Working Group for Foreign Children, children aged 8 to 12 painted the walls with brushes and paint.
The report appeared in 2007 in a Turkish daily newspaper (clipping without the newspaper’s name); the second image shows its reproduction on the website of the Education Attaché at the Turkish Consulate General in Cologne (T.C. Köln Eğitim Ataşeliği), May 2009. Translated from Turkish for senmenzel.com.
