Selçuk Dinçer

                                                                               Festival Director

The City that Loves Puppets

  Cities have colours and these colours signify their identities.

  There are cities which are grey; their smoky chimneys are bigger and more important than people.

   There are cities which are yellow; everyone is after a piece of paper, and even the inhabitants, like everything else, are for sale.

   There are cities which are red; it is ambiguous how the time between birth and death passes.  If an individual cannot keep up with the pace of the city, (s)he ‘no longer exists’.

   There are cities which are white; harmless, however, useless as well.  Whether it exists or not is uncertain, just like its people.

   Yet, there are cities which are blue, as vast as the seas.  The depths of these cities are always for the people and for glorifying the individual.

   There are cities which are green, as rich as the green forests.  Every breath reminds the human being once again that (s)he is alive.  (S)he is a part and the creator of the cultural wealth that surrounds him/her.

    And there are cities which love puppets; some of these cities are blue and some are green.  Even if they contain all the other colours within themselves, blues and greens surpass them all.  In these cities, art is everywhere, and is sine qua non.  These cities do not live only for themselves; they shed light on the world.

    With their colours of grey, yellow, green, cities are products of human beings.  People create cities with their choices.  In short, cities are how people create them.  We paint cities.  We paint some yellow, some grey, some art, and if we can, the most difficult of all, some ‘human’.  Each of us has a brush in our hands and we continuously paint the cities we live in.  However, it requires a great deal of responsibility to use that brush, for it is the life of future generations that drips from the tip of the brush.  For a colourful city painted with responsibility, to touch the city with the best tone of every colour, we love and perpetuate puppets; not only puppets, everything that makes the human being much more ‘human’.