Merhaba arkadaş !

Or “Hello Friends” ! Finally I am arrived in Turkey ! One year that I was building my EVS (European Voluntary Service) project and now it becomes real ! Wow !

But I didn’t introduce myself. I am Timothée, a 25 bearded french graphic designer from the surroundings of Paris and now volunteer in the “Atölye Deneme Sanat” Association, in Izmir, Turkey. Graduated in June 2011, I could develop year after year a deep interest in social art and political picture. And after spending a few months in a “classical” creative studio in Paris, I decided time had come for me to make my dreams real. I wouldn’t pretend to change the world with my drawings, but I would like to concretely use my skills to produce alternative projects. And that is why it was urgent for me to discover what was really association work. It is right that I could do this in France, but I concurrently wanted since many years to leave my country to have a long living experience abroad. EVS let me to kill tow birds with one stone !

So, after spending months on this endless european database –I will come back later on the EVS process–, containing all the available projects, I finally found this great team in Izmir.

« Atölye Deneme Sanat », a “working group trying to make art in multiple ways”, is a young association of friends offering workshops in theatre, music, painting, cinema and all sorts of artistic actions. Their goal –I think but I have been here since barely one week– is to explore these domains by searching every time new approaches. And most important, their actions are turned to children and young people, who are the centre of each project. These youths are mostly from disadvantaged families, with economical or disability problems, and this point was really important in my choice. 

In spite of its size, this association is full of enthusiasm and motivation and I hope that I really could help them in these 6 turkish months to come. In any case, I am sure that it would be a very rewarding experience for me.