Gönül Sen-Menzel: A Shimmer of Light Between Gray Concrete

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Her teaching experience helped the artist Gönül Sen-Menzel in her work with the children and young people.

Mauenheim. The girl tells the story almost in passing: that just a few days ago she was in the hospital in Nippes and that it was a close call. “I could hardly breathe; my whole throat was swollen shut,” the little girl says carelessly, as if she were talking about her favorite cartoon, and a moment later she has disappeared into the crowd of other children. It may be true or not; somehow you get the feeling that these stories of small and big disasters that just barely turn out well fit in quite well here.

You know these images from Meschenich, Chorweiler or Bilderstöckchen. Gray high-rises, laundry dangling from balconies, massive satellite dishes. And yet here on northern Etzelstraße, in the no man’s land between the freight station, the North Cemetery and the allotment gardens, it seems a little bleaker than elsewhere. Only a few shops line the streets; even the lawn looks more pale than green. “A ghetto-like, isolated location,” as a brochure from the youth center of the Arbeitskreis Ausländisches Kind (AAK) aptly puts it. The center now stands out from the gray blocks like a splash of color. In just two weeks, the young people, working with the artist Gönül Sen-Menzel, decorated their containers with colorful pictures.

The youth center brings a shimmer of light to the neighborhood, and not just visually. Since 1978 the facility has been a place for girls and boys to go – until 2003 the center was housed in a neighboring building at Etzelstraße 220–226. In 2003 the AAK moved out of the increasingly dilapidated building to Etzelstraße 250. Thanks to support from the city and the “Wir helfen” campaign of the “Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger”, the move could be financed, recalls AAK managing director Magnus Ringhandt. Here the children can do their homework and practice German. Director Mohammad Schirin-Gerdeawal organizes outings, and there is also time for crafts, cooking and soccer. Parents are included in the program too: the mothers meet regularly on Thursdays and Fridays for breakfast together.

“We wanted to do something special here,” says Ringhandt of the painting project. The result is impressive: the artist Sen-Menzel and the 15 to 20 children and young people designed a panorama, a globe held by hands, and the outlines of some of the children are there too. Aliye chose the color orange. “Because it glows so beautifully,” says the nine-year-old, pointing with a smile at the spot she painted. “That’s a pencil holder,” she says, and there really is a pencil holder on the wall. In orange.

The work was not always easy for the artist Sen-Menzel. Sometimes she had to be a bit strict, says the painter, whose studio is in Volkhoven-Weiler. “Spitting on the floor was forbidden,” she stresses. And the older teenagers were even banned from smoking. It helped that she is not only an artist but also a teacher by profession: “You know all the tricks for dealing with children.” At the presentation of the newly painted walls, not only AAK chairman Konrad Gilges was impressed, but also district mayor Bernd Schößler and district councilors Horst Baumann and Hans-Peter Juretzki (both SPD).

Original caption: Splashes of color in a gray concrete landscape: the children and young people from the youth center of the Arbeitskreis Ausländisches Kind have brightened up the containers on Etzelstraße.