The Erdoğan Effect
From Gezi Park to Rojava
By Joel Schalit
Welcome to Hearing Aid, the new Battleground column dedicated to field recording and found political sounds.
As cheeky as the title is, it’s sincere. Hearing Aid is about being ears to the ground and listening to the crises around us.
As a journalistic practice, it’s as documentary as it gets. Think street photography, except the medium is sound.
While audio has become essential to journalism school curricula in recent years, it’s generally not applied this way.
Part of this concerns the hegemony of video in news gathering and the prominence of talk shows as podcasts.
The audio section of The New York Times attests to how narrow it is. Even though it’s a global navigation category, click through, and you only get podcasts.
We learn to record and produce audio for such editorial contexts because that’s the dominant convention, not because it couldn’t be done differently.
Given the overwhelming amount of reporting on the collapse of Syria’s Assad regime since Christmas, we decided it was the perfect time to go the standalone route.
No two protagonists in the drama have stood out more than the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and their arch-enemy, Turkey.
Repeatedly threatening to destroy the SDF now that Ankara’s Islamist allies control Damascus, the situation remains explosive.
These two recordings help fill in the backstory. The first captures Turkish Kurds participating in June 2013’s Gezi Park protests.
Recorded in Berlin’s heavily Middle Eastern Kreuzberg neighbourhood, the singer calls for the resignation of Turkey’s then-premier, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The second recording is from a July 2020 protest in nearby Neukölln, demanding Turkey withdraw its forces from the Rojava region in northern Syria, where Kurds are the largest ethnic group.
Many of the demonstrators were from the Gezi Park period, including Kurds who, if not Syrian, have strong familial and cultural ties to the country.
The feminist politics of the SDF’s Kurdish fighters, the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) and People’s Protection Units (YPG), was pronounced.
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Photographs and audio courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.