Traditional street games, which have been handed down from generation to generation for centuries, have a crucial place in urban and social memory. These games are played with handmade toys made of materials such as mud, bone, wood, stone, cardboard, waste industrial material, etc. Street games play a big role in the physical, mental and social development of children. At the same time, it doesn’t only increase children’s creativity, environmental and material knowledge but also enables the practices of a strong relationship between elder and younger generations. However, it seems that this historical and cultural transmission has been interrupted in our era. As the function of the street changes and its publicity decreases in our modern cities, street games are also on the verge of disappearing.
The Project Street Games of Our Childhood approaches street games from a different perspective and reveals their capacity to inspire artistic works. It carries the multidimensional structures of these games, consisting of movement, sound, material, body and space relations, to performance arts. The Street Games of Our Childhood is a research project aiming to develop a unique method of transmission. It creates compositions by abstracting movements, sounds, emotions, and spatial relations by analyzing street games belonging to different cultures. Thus, the project puts the street games in an artistic field, highlighting their importance in social and urban memory and their cultural values. In addition, it is an archival work as it provides documentation of street games in a way.
As a result of the research, the work produced collectively will be presented in different mediums such as performance, video, and photography.
