Garbage collectors of Ankara discover sound of music in trash
Members of The Tin Band, made up of municipality trash collectors, use recycled instruments they find in bins to give public concerts.
“Everything in nature has a tune, even garbage,” Sertac Akin, who works as a garbage collector at the Cankaya district in Ankara province, told Al-Monitor. Akin and 11 of his colleagues have been making music for the last two years — ever since they formed “The Tin Band.” They play the instruments they find in the trash.
The Tin Band (Grup Teneke in Turkish) has given concerts all around Turkey, but their moment of fame was at a Labor Day concert when they performed before thousands. The next day, they played once more at the Labor Films Festival. The concerts took place a month after the municipal elections where the ruling Justice and Development Party lost the metropolitan municipality of the capital to the Republican People's Party (CHP) after nearly two decades. The Cankaya district where the members of the Tin Band work, the largest district in Ankara province, is a traditional CHP stronghold.
At the Labor Day concert, which Al-Monitor attended, the band came on stage in their work overalls, playing the instruments they had picked up or made themselves from what they had found in the trash. One of them played a baglama, a lute-like instrument with a long neck and seven strings, while another had tied together two large metal trash cans with a metal band to make a drum. He hit the trash cans for a bass sound and the metal band for a more piercing one. The drumsticks were also salvaged from the garbage. Two flutes that had been repaired accompanied the sound of the drums and the two singers.
Sertac Akin, the lead singer who brought the crowd to a standing ovation with "March of May 1," studied archaeology. Unable to find a job after graduating, he became a trash collector at the municipality. He told Al-Monitor that this is no easy job. “The hardest thing to do in this world is picking up garbage from the streets and loading it onto a truck. People finish their day and go home to rest. We, however, start working then, while they rest, gathering the garbage they left on the streets.”
