On December 13-14, Hafıza Merkezi will organize an international conference titled "Confronting the Past, Building the Future: Memory Studies with the Youth". The conference aims to contribute to the efforts to confront the past and to engage the youth with innovative approaches to collective memory. 

Hafıza Merkezi Memory and Youth program aims to introduce young people from different cities across Turkey and from different social backgrounds to the fields of collective memory and memorialization, to increase their interest and knowledge and interest about these topics. The program creates a space for dialogue between the young individuals, who can share their own experiences, knowledge, and memories. It also gives us an opportunity to discuss the connections between past and present struggles.

In the third round of the program, which started in March 2024, we supported young people to contribute to memorialization efforts by producing their own projects, either individually or in small groups. This international conference will offer a platform for the project participants to share the methods and results of their original memorialization projects.

The conference aims to create an environment of free thought and discussion, where participants can share their projects addressing issues such as state violence, racism, migration, gender, space and memory. Among our discussants are two experts from Armenia, Arsen Abrahamyan (Cultural and Social Narratives Lab) and Eviya Hovhannisyan (Heinrich Böll Foundation, Yerevan Branch). With roundtable meetings, interactive workshops, documentary screenings and memory walks, the event offers participants the opportunity to understand and experience the field of memory through different disciplines and practices. In the interactive workshops: 

• Damla Sandal will explore what it means to reconstruct memory by making creative interventions in photographs during the Embroidering Memory workshop. 
• Roza Erdem, through the Those Who Remain: Storytelling workshop, will allow us to vividly experience the role of stories in linking individual memory to collective memory. 
• Takuhi Tomasyan and Zeynep Kılıç, in the Tracing Rituals and Tables workshop, will demonstrate how food can shape and transform memory through the practice of making halva.

We will end the conference with a memory walk in Balat. This memory walk is the result of the creative collaboration of four institutions and individuals: the Cultural and Social Narratives Lab, with their Balat: Living Together project, the Hrant Dink Foundation, with their KarDes Multicultural Memory Tours guide, Karakutu Association, with their original methodology for interactive memory walks, and Sevcan Tiftik, who grew up in the neighborhood.