Interviewed By: Gamze Erentürk

Photograph By: Delizia Flaccavento

Onar’s path with Delizia Flaccavento had crossed through their documentary called Girls of Hope. With Ayşegül Selenga Taşkent, they produced such a impressive and heartbreaking documentary about girls in Eastern Turkey who struggle, fight and hope for education. As a documentary photographer, she travelled around Turkey. You could also see her photos from Gezi protests, LGBTI pride march and so on… We talked about her projects, Turkish educational system, gender gap in education, İstanbul and being a foreign women in this city/country.

Q: Can you tell us your story (shortly) before İstanbul?

Delizia Flaccavento: I was born in Sicily, but left the Trinacria after high-school. I first went to Pisa where I graduated in Philosophy, then I worked for a year in Rome as a journalist for a national weekly newspaper, left the job to do the European Voluntary Service in Wales, then got a scholarship to study photography at Southampton Solent University, moved to Sheffield to complete the only National Council for the Training of Journalists Press Photography certificate in the UK and finally got another scholarship and went to the US, where I earned a MA in Photojournalism from Ohio University.

Q: In a nutshell, who is Delizia Flaccavento?

D.F: I am a documentary photographer who is very interested in human rights and who loves meeting people and telling their stories.

Q: What did bring you to İstanbul? And why did you decide to stay? (Was there any specific moment or reason?)

D.F: My best friend is a documentary filmmaker and I came to Istanbul to work on a project together. The liveliness of the city, together with the never-ending issues one can deal with here, made me want to stay longer. As a documentary photographer, I felt I could make a difference and work on projects, which might give a small contribution to the community. I applied at various universities and got a photography teaching position. I’m currently an instructor at Bahcesehir University.

Before moving to Istanbul, I lived for almost 4 years in the US and I will never forget how American society is shaped in a way that I couldn’t NOT be aware of my skin color: here in Turkey, I feel I cannot NOT be aware that I am a woman in a male dominated society.

Q: Which have been your first experiences, difficulties, observations as a foreign woman in Istanbul? (positive, negative, what surprised you, what did you like, what you did not etc.)

D.F: Living in Istanbul is tough, whether you are a man or a woman, unless you live the privileged life of the rich. From the very beginning, I felt that there is a very strong societal pressure to get married, have children and that a single woman is (generally speaking and with the due exceptions) less respected. On the other hand, here you still find men who stand up to give you their seat on the bus, something that would never happen in Northern Europe or in the US. Before moving to Istanbul, I lived for almost 4 years in the US and I will never forget how American society is shaped in a way that I couldn’t NOT be aware of my skin color: here in Turkey, I feel I cannot NOT be aware that I am a woman in a male dominated society.

Q: How does living in Turkey influence/change you? Can you compare Delizia before living Turkey and after?

D.F: Compared to the places where I lived before (my native Italy, the UK and the US), living in Turkey has made me much more sensitive to women’s rights issues. Whatever project I do, consciously or unconsciously, I end up concentrating on women. As a woman who is stubbornly living her life as she wants to live it, seeing women who are denied the same chance makes me very upset and makes me want to fight to change the situation.

Q: What would you suggest to other foreign women who decide to come and live in İstanbul/Turkey?

D.F: I would recommend them to embrace the experience and make the most of it. Turks are very welcoming and friendly, and they love foreigners. I would recommend to always engage in constructive dialogue, to get to know the mentality and to act accordingly: the system doesn’t work, but there is remarkable individual effort, which means that a “no” is never an absolute “no” if one manages to find their way around. Of course, at times frustration does take over, but I am still here because I didn’t give up and I do believe there is space for improvement.

Education is a human rights issue and we should all join forces to solve a problem that is still today one of Turkey’s bleeding scars.

Q: In which countries have you specifically worked on Education and why?

D.F: The Girls of Hope project is director Ayşegül Selenga Taşkent’s idea. When she shared it with me, I loved it and that’s how I got into the female illiteracy problem here in Turkey. It was the first time I worked on education. This past January, I went to Nigeria and worked on education also there. I documented the life in a boarding school run by a congregation of Catholic nuns. In this case, my idea was to show that Nigeria doesn’t mean only Boko Haram, unlike it is unfortunately shown in the international media.

Q: Did you focus on girl education specifically? Was it the aim since the beginning or has the project been changed while ongoing?

D.F: We did a lot of research specifically on the female illiteracy rates and reasons behind it, so, yes, since the beginning we focused on girls’ education. As far as my Nigerian project is concerned, I didn’t think just in terms of girls’ education, but the school has many more girls than boys and the boarding is just for girls, so I ended up mainly with photos of girls.

Q: Çağdaş Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği (Association for Supporting Contemporary Life) helped you in the project for Girls Of Hope/Thanks To My Mother as well as giving you contacts and a background. What are the other roles that ÇYDD did have? You said that there is not a real follow up process on the girls helped. Which is the reason in your opinion?

D.F: ÇYDD opened their archive to us, gave us the opportunity to read the letters girls write to them to apply for a scholarship and to choose our potential subjects from the letters. The ÇYDD office in Van, where we shot the film, was very helpful as we had a volunteer going with us every time we visited the girls in their homes: this was especially important, because the girls and their families trust ÇYDD local people and they opened their doors to us thanks to them.

While ÇYDD was not involved in the production of the film, the collaboration was closer for the photo book Thanks to My Mother, for which ÇYDD local offices in Kırklareli, Niğde, Adana and Sinop made a broad selection of girls, which I then narrowed down, and took me to their homes to take their portraits together with their mothers.

Many people, after watching the film and reading the book, ask us what they can do for the girls, not just in terms of donations, but in terms of meeting the girls and possibly working with them. While ÇYDD does a great job in distributing the scholarships, it doesn’t have the will to engage in other projects: the visionary person who founded ÇYDD, Türkan Saylan, died a few years ago and since then ÇYDD has just struggled to keep the legacy alive without trying new things. Were Türkan Saylan alive today, I am sure she would have promoted new projects to bring volunteers and girls actively together, but unfortunately it is not the case at the moment.

Q: In Turkey, have you only collaborated with ÇYDD about this topic?

D.F: Yes. We did try to initiate collaborations with some educational think-tank and with other organizations, but, after an initial interest, none of them has been responsive. I guess other organizations fear that in the project there is “too much” ÇYDD involvement to do any good to them, but they completely disregard the fact that it is a human rights issue we are talking about and that we should all join forces to solve a problem that is still today one of Turkey’s bleeding scars.

Q: You also work for a prestigious university. What is your opinion about Turkish Educational system? Can you notice any different attitude towards education between man and women?

D.F: Unfortunately, the Turkish educational system doesn’t stimulate creativity and critical thinking, but is designed to create technicians that enter the system without ever questioning it. The main problem is the university entry exam, which is based on an absurd chart where Medicine is first and subjects like Archeology and Ancient Greek last, and places students according to a series of multiple choice questions, without taking into consideration their specific talents and interests. Since elementary school, students are told that, if they are clever, they should study science and become doctors, engineers or, at least, lawyers. Art is something that can be done only in the spare time, if one has any. Things are of course slowly changing, so today more than 5 years ago, I get students who want to study photography and video because they love it and not because they couldn’t get access to any other departments. Two years ago, the Gezi Park protests liberated people’s creativity and, although the actual protests were violently suppressed by the government, the art scene in Turkey has made a quantum leap from which there is no way back.

As for the differences between men and women, very often my best students are girls, but I feel they lack the confidence society has given to men for so long, and I also feel that, in the end, they would easily give everything up before accomplishing what they want to accomplish, in order to do what society expects them to do and what all their friends and family members do. Once again, if this is the general trend, I see more and more exceptions to the rule. By no means, I am against marriage and family life, I just hope that Turkish people, and especially women, can follow more and more their inner voice, be individuals and do what they really want to do rather than fulfilling expectations imposed upon them. This will be the start of a much happier, healthier and more democratic society.

Q: Have you found any pattern in the gender gap in education in the Countries where you worked and lived? If yes, how?

D.F: When women don’t go to school, they get married much earlier, they have more children than they can afford, they cannot defend their rights because they are not aware of their human rights and all this perpetuates the cycle of poverty and abuse where women are only seen as child bearers. A girl going to school means a more just, democratic, healthy and happy society: everywhere in the world, reducing the educational gap between men and women and between rich and poor means to really give a chance of self determination to so many people whose fate is otherwise written before they are even born. Investing on education worldwide would cost much less than military spending, and would probably save us from quite a few wars…

You can check the documentary from here: Girls Of Hope

You can see the book from here: Thanks To My Mother