The 3rd Peyas Women’s Labour Gathering and Culture Festival, organised by Kayapınar Municipality under the slogan “Building Solidarity Through Our Labour and Culture”, has begun. The opening ceremony of the festival, which will take place at Park 75 in Kayapınar district from 23 to 25 October, was attended by Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality Co-Mayors Serra Bucak and Emin Ay, Kayapınar Municipality Co-Mayors Berivan Gülşen Sincar and Cengiz Dündar, DBB Co-Spokespersons Demet Ceylan and Ayhan Karatekin, district municipality co-mayors and a large number of women.

Organised to support women’s production and strengthen social solidarity, the festival opened its doors early in the day. Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality Co-Mayor Serra Bucak and Kayapınar Municipality Co-Mayor Berivan Gülşen Sincar addressed the opening ceremony.

Fieldwork to raise the visibility of women’s labour

Kayapınar Municipality Co-Mayor Berivan Gülşen Sincar said that women engaged in production and labour, women’s commune groups and women’s cooperatives were coming together at the gathering to showcase their work.

Sincar explained that, guided by an approach to democratic and participatory local government, they had conducted fieldwork involving hundreds of people to explore how they could further raise the visibility of women and their labour and what steps could be taken to achieve this. She said the work had brought various problems and findings to light. Sincar added that they had decided to organise the festival after considering how to develop solutions to existing problems. She also stated that local authorities aimed to mobilise their resources to organise more gatherings of this kind.

Co-Mayor Bucak: The space for women, which some have sought to erase from memory, is re-emerging

Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality Co-Mayor Serra Bucak said that, since their election in 2024, they had been working to restore the visibility of women’s spaces, women’s organisations and women’s collective presence, whose voices, actions and labour had been subjected to attempts to erase them from public memory, and to expand their work in this direction.

Noting that the results of these efforts were evident at the gathering, Co-Mayor Bucak said: “Of course, all this collective production, all the production carried out through solidarity, also brings women’s organised struggle to the fore.”
Employment and Production Opportunities to Tackle Poverty Among Women

Co-Mayor Bucak said that the women’s labour gatherings organised by district municipalities, the Metropolitan Municipality and cities across the region had two main objectives. The first, she explained, was to remove the barriers preventing women from accessing employment and participating in working life in response to deepening poverty among women.

She noted that local authorities and business communities in the cities were working together and joining forces to change this situation. She added that intensive efforts were under way to explore how women could participate in employment, working life and production.

Emphasising their aim of increasing women’s visibility in these areas and creating new opportunities for them, Co-Mayor Bucak described the three-day gathering as a new, collective space. She said it was a place where women could produce together while organising, supporting one another and connecting with each other’s lives and stories.

A Holistic Approach to Women’s Organised Struggle

Co-Mayor Bucak said their second main objective was to take a holistic approach to women’s organised struggle and women’s initiatives. She continued:

“We see all of these efforts, from employment and producing together to solidarity-based production and coming together, as a mechanism that will strengthen women’s gender consciousness, raise their awareness of the importance of organising, and enhance their resilience in the face of violence, as well as expand the methods available to combat violence.”

Call for Support for Women’s Solidarity Gardens

Highlighting the importance of women’s gardens established across the city, Co-Mayor Bucak said they wanted to make spaces available for women’s and young people’s production, from the city centre to rural areas. She said:

“District municipalities and our Metropolitan Municipality have established women’s gardens and women’s solidarity gardens in Diyarbakır. Women work together in groups and initiatives here. They grow their produce, harvest their crops, tend their plots, grow food for the winter and gather their summer harvests. All of this is extremely valuable to us.

“We want to expand these spaces. We want to open up every space in this city, from the centre to rural areas, that belongs to us, to the people, to society and to the municipality, for women’s production, youth-led production, women’s employment and the employment of young women. To achieve this, we are calling for solidarity and support. We invite you, our valued women, to join us here.”

‘We Want to Grow in Numbers and Develop Collective Solutions’

Inviting all women from Amed and Peyas to attend the three-day festival, Co-Mayor Bucak stressed the need to make local government services more rooted in society. She said: “Following this three-day Women’s Labour Gathering, we want to grow in numbers, meet more women, listen to the needs of more women and develop collective solutions to address those needs.”

Noting that they frequently emphasised the importance of embedding municipal and local government services in society, Co-Mayor Bucak stressed that they remained committed to this approach despite facing certain challenges in putting it into practice. She said that bringing women together to develop collective solutions to their needs would pave the way for services to become more rooted in society and for a perspective grounded in women’s liberation, equality and justice.

Metropolitan Municipality Takes Part in the Festival with Four Stalls

The festival, which features stalls run by nearly 50 women and production groups, also includes Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality, which will be present with four stalls throughout the three-day event. The municipality will showcase textiles, artistic upcycling, garden produce and medicinal and aromatic products. For the first time, pickles made from produce grown in the municipality’s gardens will also be sold at the stalls by women.