Easy steps for colletive working in Sinop

The Dynamic Archive is part of the Sinopale 7 in Turkey. We include in the archive as components the methods of the workers and volunteers working beside the Sinopale in their workshops. Chadha and Kate are Erasmus+ volunteers in Sinopale 7. They are part of Northern lights Erasmus+ Evs project.

Kate started to ask people in Sinop if they  know about Sarıkum Rescue and Rehabilitation Center for the Wild Life which is located near Sinop and working in 5 regions.  Almost no one knew that the center exists and that there is an organisation that can help the injured animals.

With friends we started to discuss how people think and interact with the nature and environment in the black sea region; both the ones that live here but also the ones that visit.  During the discussion we created our team - Kate Buriak and Chadha Mazigh. We decided to collect garbage in the beach area and make an installation which can show how dirty the sea and beach around this area is and how many animals were rescued by the center this year.In order to achieve that we decided to use collected plastic recipients and print on them the data from the rescue center: the type of animals and the number of rescued ones.

Chadha proposed to call our friends to help us with cleaning the beach area. From now our project started to be the living organism of teamwork. We are not from Sinop but because of our volunteering program we have a lot friends - other volunteers, mentors, curators, colleagues from the  program. We are a big community here and it's so good to have 100% help from your friends.

The first step in the development of our project was to make the stencils that represent each type of animal. For that, we organized a workshop in the Hal, a public market that was the main location of the Sinopale. Everyone was invited to participate in collectively drawing and cutting the stencils. 

The idea was to show types and numbers of animals rescued in Sarıkum Rescue and Rehabilitation Center for the Wild Life. Since Kate is a watercolor animals painter and she decided to use painting but with stencils. This is an easy technique that can be used by anyone, regardless of their experience with paint and crafts.  It allows us to have an  interesting worshop and engage with audience. A lot of people had fun with us, got information about the project and all the animal stencils were ready in short term.

During the workshop we explained our ideas for the project and invited the participants to take part in the next step:  to collect the garbage from the beach ( now a not so nice and clean activity). Since people were already involved and engaged in the project, it was interesting to them to continue and see the result: in the end we would print the stencils in the trash that we needed to collect. We tried to chose a time that would be easy for everyone, so we schedule for a few hours after the workshop. This way everyone could still work on their projects or rest in between.

For printing stencils we needed to find rather big containers or pieces of garbage, so during the cleaning of the seaside we separated the trash.We created the teams of two people to whom we gave two plastic bags - for simple garbage and for garbage that we can use. We also provided them with gloves and in general assisted in carrying the full bags.

During the process the new people were coming and we explained our idea, showed the pictures, told about all the events that we would have, to let people join whenever they wanted. Some wanted to make stencils, the others were more interested in cleaning the beach. All the time we checked if the people had enough materials, if they were comfortable with the  tasks we were giving. An important part we realized was that for making  the stencils people were more interested because of  leaning a new technique. And for collecting trash people wanted to join because they felt they were doing something useful.