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. The carpet of the festival, 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. The festival engages them in artistic process, which functions as spiritual healing for those who have experienced darkness and horrendous incidents and are dealing with unimaginable challenges in life.

Every year, the Flying Carpet Children Festival creates a cultural experience consisting of various workshops and performances through the festival week for the most in need.  The 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 10 days, holding workshops and the most innovative educational experiences, incorporating technology, art, music and circus. 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.

The project is implemented by Sirkhane Social Circus School, a collective that helps restore confidence in refugee youth by teaching circus tricks in Mardin. Their mission is to provide safe, friendly and embracing environment for children, who are effected by conflicts. Replace their damaged childhood with happiness and enrich the children’s imagination with colors of social circus pedagogy.

Sirkhane Social Circus School is carrying out activities in Turkey and Iraq. Children have opportunities to collaborate and form friendships with each other, beyond gender, social and cultural differences. In doing so, they manifest peace, harmony, open mindedness and cheerfulness in their local and global communities. Laughter is childhood, laughter is happiness.