CROSSINGS
Join our three-day exhibition Crossings at Niemetzstraße 1, 12055 Berlin from 18–20 July 2025.
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Crossings presents collaborative, student-led and community-centered research through creative formats including counter-mapping, photography, short films, documentaries, zines, poetry, and collage, illustrating how everyday practices and transnational connections shape identity and belonging beyond national frameworks.
The accompanying symposium features workshops, panel discussions, and screenings, with contributions from artists, scholars, and neighbors.
Refuge Worldwide, NM1, Niemetzstraße 1, 12055 Berlin
Fri, 18 July 2025 17:00–22:00 Vernissage
Sat–Sun, 19–20 July 2025 12:00–20:00
Crossings gathers the diverse experiences of Berlin’s diasporic communities, exploring how belonging is shaped, questioned, negotiated and transformed across cultural, national, and affective borders. Emerging from two interdisciplinary and inter-university X-Tutorials—Forms of Belonging: The Making and Unmaking of Transnational Identities Across Afro-Asian Diasporas in Berlin and Understanding the Concept of Belonging Through Cinema: Crossing the Borders of Türkiye—this joint research project and exhibition aims to bring together communities in meaningful ways that traverse the boundaries of genres, geographies and generations.
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Drawing from multiple disciplines, Crossings challenges academic conventions by centering lived experiences and diasporic knowledges. The exhibition presents collaborative, student-led and community-centered research through creative formats including counter-mapping, photography, short films, documentaries, zines, poetry, and collage, illustrating how everyday practices and transnational connections shape identity and belonging beyond national frameworks. The accompanying symposium features workshops, panel discussions, and screenings, with contributions from artists, scholars, and neighbors.
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Situated in Refuge Worldwide’s NM1 space in Neukölln, Crossings reaches beyond university walls to engage communities often excluded from academic discourse. Committed to inclusivity and collaboration, the research project not only offers a platform for dialogue but also creates long-term resources for educators and communities, including a podcast series, exhibition catalogue, and digital archive. Proposing novel, participatory methodologies, Crossings advances migration and diaspora studies by marking, delineating, refusing, and transgressing the intersections of belonging in Berlin and beyond.
The Program
Fri 18 July 2025
17:00–22:00
17:00–17:30 Welcome and Introduction with ጀበና ቡና/敬茶 ceremony
17:30–18:30 Artist Tour
18:30–18:45 Break
18:45–19:45 Artist Tour
19:45–20:15 Light Bites
20:15–21:30 Poetry Reading with Asrin Mahmood, Elena Agebo, Savannah Sipho, Anna Frehiwot Maconi, Julianne Chua, and more
Identity Across Borders and Alternative Methodologies
Sat 19 July 2025
12:00–20:00
12:00–14:00 Panel | Framing Democracy: Power, Populism and the Politics of the Image with ErtuÄŸ TombuÅŸ and Özlem Sarıyıldız
15:00–18:00 Community Workshop | Family Archives and Collective Memory withGörkem Akgöz
Registration link: https://forms.gle/n1Pt2LrVcyPXHw2v7
18:00–20:00 Community Workshop for Queer, Trans, Intersex, Nonbinary and BIPOC | Between Bodies: Somatic Explorations on the Notion of Belonging with Deniz Dilan Arslan
Registration link:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/NYpOJAcAX3v520yCVIRFGkFob2jS8bTMaHWlYLVNxwg/
Arts, Diaspora and Affective Belonging
Sun 20 July 2025
12:00–20:00
12:00–14:00 Community Workshop | Mapping Feelings: An Intuitive Art Workshop on Belonging with Henok Getachew Woldegebreal
Registration link: https://forms.gle/FHhf8qFpbG7FwFKY9
14:00–17:00 Community Workshop | Ancestral Connections and Jewelry Making with Nelden Djakababa Gericke
Registration link: https://forms.gle/g4ZwMu3kQLhTQh2i8
Our Tutorials
Crossings is the outcome of a year-long collaboration between two student-led X-Tutorials at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, organized under the Berlin University Alliance’s Student Research Opportunities ProgramË£ (StuROPË£). These tutorials are interdisciplinary research seminars created by students for students, fostering collaborative inquiry beyond traditional classroom formats.​
The first X-Tutorial, Forms of Belonging: The Making and Unmaking of Transnational Identities Across Afro-Asian Diasporas in Berlin, examines how Afro-Asian diasporic communities negotiate identity, memory, and belonging across national and symbolic borders. Through field research, guest lectures, and collaborative learning, the course explores Berlin as a site of superdiversity and transnational interaction.
The second, Understanding the Concept of Belonging Through Cinema: Crossing the Borders of Türkiye, takes Türkiye as a point of departure but cross beyond its national borders to explore how cinema reflects and constructs experiences of migration, displacement, and belonging. Anchored in T.J. Demos’ The Migrant Image, this tutorial treats film as a space where dominant narratives are disrupted and where migratory subjects reclaim agency.
Both tutorials´s articipants engage with artistic works to analyze how the "migrant image" functions not just as representation, but as a critical method of resistance and identity-making.​Together, these student- led research projects reflect on how diasporic communities in Berlin challenge dominant narratives and create new forms of visibility, solidarity, and belonging. This exhibition brings their work into public dialogue as both a space of knowledge-sharing and a living archive of student-led, community-rooted research.​​