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American Music

Jones Benally

This is Dr Jones. He is a Navajo medicine man and chanter. His daughter and two sons are musicians in the punk-rock protest band Blackfire. I met them in the Navajo reservation in Arizona whilst doing an explorative journey into the rich tapestry of American music together with filmmaker Iggi Ögard. We drove 8000 miles that winter. From highways to pathways, from big cities to quirky, small towns off the beaten track. We met local musicians with a story to tell, be it bluegrass pickers in Tennessee or punk rock polka rebels in Texas, amateurs or professionals. Each voice reflects Americas unique cultural and ethnical diversity, and their music follows the landscape, from the endless arid desert in Arizona to the muddy swamplands in Louisiana.

 

 

Tarlabasi

A few hundred meters from the bustling life of Istiklal Caddesi shopping hub in the heart of Istanbul, lies the proud but marginalized neighbourhood of Tarlabasi

Tarlabasi

The massive gentrification process taking place in Tarlabasi is to attract tourists. Now the state wants the marginalized people who live here to move away. But many of them have nowhere to go.

Tarlabasi

For hundreds of years, Tarlabasi´s narrow, winding streets were a peaceful home to non-Muslim diplomats and later Greek merchants. But as religious tensions rose through the mid-20th century, the Turkish government launched organised pogroms targeting non-Muslims in the city. In the ensuing violence, homes and shops were looted and destroyed. Over the following decades, those abandoned buildings were gradually filled by Gypsies known locally as “Roman”, and by refugees fleeing the Turkish-Kurdish civil war in the late 1980s

Tarlabasi

Tarlabasi´s central location has in recent years made it into prime revenue-generating real estate, and despite objections from residents, architects, and human rights groups, the neighbourhood is being demolished. At stake is Tarlabasi’s diverse and vital culture

School kids

In one of the poorest areas in Chicago art classes are changing lives.

At Legacy Charter School in North Lawndale – a long-impoverished neighbourhood on the west side of Chicago – they believe art creates successful children. All of their 500 pupils from pre-k to 8th grade have 120 minutes of art classes as well as additional music lessons with access to first class tools and materials. That is a lot more than most other public schools in the Chicago area.

 

 

 

School kids

In an area with high crime rates and gang violence, the principal Lisa Kenner believes that the art classes helps the children to discover skills they didn´t believe they had as well as sense of mastering. – Art is all about being human and it awakes feelings and empathy, which is something these children really needs.

 

 

 

School kids

Nearly fifty years after the African-American civil rights movement, most of the USA remains a residentially segregated society which inhabit different neighborhoods of significantly different quality. Safety is the fundamental, basic foundation needed for a thriving, healthy community and at Legacy Charter School they give the kids tools to succeed in an unsafe environment by means of extensive art and music classes.

Legacy Charter School, Chicago

School kids

Legacy Charter School, Chicago

School kids

The AlSeeraj Center for education, Gaziantep