Izmir: A Big Wedding Hall

H. CENK DERELI

“Izmir is a big wedding hall,” Tamer Varış once said. Considering the feeling the local governing bodies generate as they are managing the urban culture, he is not wrong. With regulations, business models based on tender laws, and unqualified decision makers, cultural facilities under the responsibility of the metropolitan and district municipalities are used in the simplest manner either as a wedding hall or as locations for municipal events. You cannot organize a city festival with three thousands tickets in these places and yet no one objects to a wedding ceremony for three thousands guests. And it’s sadder that the enthusiasm caused by a wedding organization suddenly disappears when it comes to discovering new methods to pave way for independent cultural initiatives in the city. When you start to question the quality of events and operational issues, organizing a concert for one Turkish Lira requires you to ignore the incredibly loud air conditioning that has to be turned off when the concert begins, the leaky roof of the foyer where you cannot see the exhibited pieces due to insufficient lighting, and the conditions of the toilets that you can smell from meters away.

izmir, cenk dereli

Expecting the state institutions, strictly adhered to the regulations and laws, to change overnight may be a naïve hope, just as it may be to expect it to happen in a week, a year or even in a thousand years. Meetings organized under the name of “democratic process” are turning into rituals where people voice propaganda of volunteerism fetish, and call on productive minds of the city to make sacrifices. Rather than an effusive environment to produce, a game is being established where intellectual labor is exploited. And at the end, it is always up to the mayor. Regardless of ideology, this is the true nature of local authorities around the country.

The funny part is that the practices of the private sector are not any different from state institutions when it comes to urban culture and city’s cultural life. Due to the economic conditions they have created, each of these institutions and individuals are more powerful than the city. These figures place the responsibility for contributing to İzmir’s prestige on the local authorities and demand the government representatives to take action. Those who are gaining profit by using the wealth of the city and its surroundings through various production methods, do not hold themselves at all responsible for creating the desired conditions while complaining that “Izmir does not have that spark that Istanbul and foreign cities have.” The contributions of particular individuals and institutions, for some reason, fail to go beyond a certain volume, and do not even get close to their generous actions and visions in Istanbul, the main benchmark.

Izmir is a big wedding hall; the hall is neglected, the operator is stubborn without any vision, the elders in the family are penny pinchers…

If this is the case, the only thing can be done by those who wish to live in this city, to dream about this city, to turn potential into possibilities, is building the life they want on their own. There is no other remedy but to accept that the city we live in had been built by the local government, the organized civil society and the capital owners, and to become a creative and proactive citizen in ways of overcoming the current situation. Rather than drowning in clichés spoken by people who believe no one would make anything interesting, we need to meet people who are doing inspiring works, and create new things together in Izmir—the city that is depicted as an area of impossibility.

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