CHILDREN EVERYWHERE SHOULD BE OFFERED CULTURAL OPPORTUNITIES TO FURTHER DEVELOP THEIR SOCIAL AND CREATIVE SKILLS.
— SAHBA AMINIKIA
FOUNDEr, FLYING CARPET
Our
MISSION
The Flying Carpet Children Festival is a learning platform for artists and children, alike, to create a harmonious experience through music, light, beauty, and truth.
Cultural and artistic opportunities in modern societies form a large portion of social activities and are available to the citizens of those countries on a massive scale. However, the problems that such societies are mostly suffering from on a global scale such as terrorism, violence and delinquencies come from societies where cultural opportunities and exposure to beauty is rare to non-existent. Therefore, it is necessary for more privileged communities to invest in the cultural activities of deprived societies in order to educate and generate productive members for the world.
Children are the future of every community and by investing in their education and in their access to beauty and light, we are moving towards a brighter future on a global scale. Our carpet, as a portable platform, flies to the most disadvantaged regions of the world in order to engage and connect with the most disadvantaged youth of every community. We engage them in artistic process, which in our opinion functions as spiritual healing for those who have experienced darkness and horrendous incidents and are dealing with unimaginable challenges in life.
Carpet riders
We create a cultural experience consisting of various workshops and performances through the festival week for the most in need.
Every year, the Flying Carpet Children Festival gathers and hosts around 30-40 composers, performers, circus artists, dancers, multidisciplinary artists and designers in order to create the most magical experience possible through a two-week residency in the city of Mardin. The collective performs in cities and remote villages in southeast Turkey, where cultural and educational opportunities for children are scarce.
The artists are curated and chosen by festival founder Sahba Aminikia and Sirkhane founder, Pinar Demiral, through an open call on social media and on various websites. The festival lasts throughout the entire summer, holding hundreds of workshops and the most innovative educational experiences, incorporating technology, art, music and circus. The last two weeks of the festival are dedicated to preparing for one week of performances throughout the region during the last week. After artists’ arrival, they are paired and assigned to one another and to local child artists in order to form artistic collaborations and enrich their performances and their art. The performances are put into a unified context through storytelling techniques and will be taken to remote locations as one unified production.
Flying carpet is for everyone, but especially the children. We believe that children growing up in the most difficult circumstances are the most inspired to bring change to their surroundings. We invest in the most vulnerable children in one of the most difficult regions of the world to be a child. We collaborate with children in order to experience and develop a creative process which can provide every child with unlimited opportunities and methods of expression in the most meaningful way possible. We provide children with many musical solutions to life, not necessarily to create a musician out of them but simply to provide them with creative methods to express their own story and feelings without being directly exposed to their audience and to their surroundings.
We intend to sustain our Flying Carpet for the years to come, in order to create an example for the entire world and for the artistic community – an example that empowers artists from all around the world to form their own initiatives and engage with the public and those without access to beauty and light. The carpet exists to teach artists what it means to work in difficult circumstances and to preserve the fire of hope for thousands of years as spiritual leaders of the world.
THE
CHILDREN
MARDIN,
TURKEY
The festival began and was held between September 1st and 15th, 2018 by holding 8 major concerts, 150 workshops, reaching out to 1,500 through workshops and more than 7,000 audience members in three cities across the region. In 2019, the festival expanded to 7 different cities and villages and held performances every night in a different location through the week of performances between August 18th and 24th. The number of invited artists also expanded from 30 in 2018 to 40 in 2019. The workshops were held in the course of two months instead of two weeks in 2018.
OUR TEAM
Flying Carpet founder, Sahba Aminikia, and our team of visionaries are creating a festival to engage and educate children and adults through a curated experience of music, beauty, and light.
