Our Approach
At Crossings, our mission is to create an inclusive space where diverse experiences of belonging, identity, and migration are explored through student-led and research-based learning. Rather than framing belonging as a fixed identity, we see it as a process—through fieldwork, film, photography, poems and oral histories, our approach foregrounds the everyday strategies through which diasporas in Berlin navigate visibility, exclusion, and connection. Crossings embraces experimentation, care, and critique as key components of our shared research.
Through this interdisciplinary exhibition, we aim to create a space for public dialogue and collective learning, reimagine how knowledge is produced and shared—foregrounding perspectives that are often underrepresented. By weaving together theory, lived experience, and artistic expression, Crossings aspires to bridge connections across borders, disciplines, and communities.
Home is (not) here 此心安处是吾乡
Christina Adamski
This small video project explores the lived experiences and identity negotiations of individuals of half-German, half-Chinese descent growing up in Berlin in the context of an increasingly globalized and digitized world. Framed by theoretical concepts such as Homi Bhabha’s third space, Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity as a “production,” and Byram’s model of intercultural competence, we examine how hybrid identities are formed, challenged, and expressed.
At the heart of this project lies the tension and richness of growing up “between” two cultures. For many, being both German and Chinese means navigating spaces where they are perceived as “other” in both cultural contexts, leading to moments of identity crisis, resilience, and redefinition. The project foregrounds the perspectives of second-generation individuals who actively shape their own hybrid identities through language, education, digital networks, and transnational experiences.
The Taste of Coming Home
Aliza Halberstam
Feelings of belonging to one's cultural origin often fade during assimilation and for the next generation frequently become completely unreachable when growing up fully integrated into the culture of a new host country. And what remains is a feeling of disconnection and misplacement.
While food transcends barriers such as place, language, and time (death), how these recipes and cultural traditions of preparing food are taught and the memories and feelings connected are often just as important as the actual recipe itself.
In this short film, individuals are interviewed on their associations of food to feelings of belonging and home. After filming the process of cooking recipes that they thought of, they are asked what tastes like home to them. The project’s focus lies in the documentation of family recipes and the memories associated with them.
Thoughts on African Studies
Darius Adu Bright
This documentary explores the multifaceted and evolving landscape of scientific knowledge production about Africa through conversations with attendees of the 2023 ASWAD (Association for the Worldwide Study of the African Diaspora) and ASAA (African Studies Association of Africa) conferences in Accra and Lubumbashi. It interrogates what it means to be part of the intellectual labour that defines and redefines African Studies today. The film captures reflections on the deeply interdisciplinary nature of African Studies, the critical role of the African Diaspora, and the significance of the ASAA as a continental anchor point in the global academic arena.
Contributors offer insights into how international research collaborations, often shaped by unequal power dynamics and funding disparities, continue to influence whose voices are heard and which questions are asked in academic scholarship about Africa. Participants emphasize how political decisions, especially in the so-called “Global North,” create epistemic hierarchies that affect both funding structures and scholarly visibility. Initially envisioned as an exploration of the challenges African scholars face in the academy, the film evolved into a broader, more nuanced project. Through engaging dialogues, it reveals the richness, complexity, and resilience of African scholars who work within and beyond institutional limitations.
Themes of language, audience, and representation come to the fore, compelling the filmmakers to reassess their assumptions. As one interviewee, T. Siyabulela, articulates: “The question is not ‘What is Africa?’ The question should be: ‘What can Africa do?’” Rather than framing African scholars solely through the lens of struggle, the film highlights their agency, innovation, and critical interventions. It presents African scholars not as passive subjects of academic structures, but as active agents reshaping knowledge production, challenging colonial legacies, and asserting intellectual sovereignty within a global scholarly ecosystem still marked by asymmetries of power.
Where Afro-Shops Belong
Elisabeth Ogheneyoma Schotsman
The process of mapping Berlin’s Black Afro-Shops highlights their value, stories of existence, and importance to the city's landscape and their connected diasporas. This project focuses especially on the accessibility of its research for the African diasporas and the functionality of using the map as a tool to navigate and network in Berlin.
German Afro-Shops that are owned by people of African descent are often overlooked and not included in the national narrative of Germany's identity. The presence of Black people and people of African descent in Germany succumbs to the marginalization of Black history and to the scattering of diasporic communities, which is enhanced by the structure of a city that was built to erase their mark.
Mutfak
Julianne Chua and Anna Frehiwot Maconi with Quinsy Gario, Yero Adugna Eticha, Henok Getachew Woldegebreal, Sarnt Utamachote ษาณฑ์ อุตมโชติ, Yara Mekawei, Faruk Çobanoğlu, Jia Jia, Tina, Kuo-Roser Studio, Fazil Moradi, Nelden Djakababa Gericke, Lou Mo and Musquiqui Chihying
Mutfak dishes out diasporic and decolonial perspectives on food, family and fictions peppered with interviews, field recordings, sound archives and poetry. Our goal is to amplify lesser-heard voices and nurture transversal affinities across Afro-Asian diasporas.
Listen:https://oroko.live/artists/julianne-chua-and-anna-frehiwot-maconi
Remembrance in Motion
Jamil Zegrer, Sari Emoto, Yaren Konca
Remembrance in Motion explores the terrain of memory politics and the accessibility of public remembrance through the Statue of Peace in Berlin-Moabit. Installed to commemorate the victims of sexual violence and war crimes—commonly referred to as “comfort women”—the statue has become a nucleus of transnational memory. While intended as a site of reflection, it simultaneously exposes the friction between historical acknowledgment and political denial. Created during the 30th anniversary of the Berlin-Tokyo Städtepartnerschaft (city partnership), the project interrogates how remembrance becomes spatially and symbolically contested in transnational contexts.
This short film offers a reading of testimonies from Voices of the Korean Comfort Women: History Rewritten from Memories, edited by Chungmoo Choi and Hyunah Yang. Framed within the broader discourse on memory politics and how history is remembered and forgotten through public spaces, testimonies through Yeji Cho’s voice question the debates surrounding the Statue of Peace in Moabit, Berlin. It asks: Who has the right to memory in public spaces? The ongoing project aims to conduct a series of interviews with key stakeholders, including Professor Steffi Richter, Dr John Njenga Karugia, representatives from Korea Verband, and officials from the Bezirksamt Moabit. Ultimately, the film positions the Statue of Peace as a hub for an urban memoryscape.
The “Turk-Strike”
Jamil Zegrer
The “Turk-Strike” centers around the 1973 workers’ strike in a manufacturing plant in Cologne. A crucial step in the labor movement of the 60s and 70s, the event tells a story of Turkish-German solidarity in the working field. The so-called “wilder Streik” or “wildcat strike,” a form of strike without the organization of a union, was a historic moment for the guest worker generation, who for the first time prominently rebelled against harsh working conditions. Although this story of solidarity between workers ultimately culminated in failure, it remains an essential point in history for Turkish workers in Germany and the history of the German West. The project is a short essay film, assembled from the few existing archive materials about the strike and enriched by personal drawings which lead through the narration. A short summary of the strike, its course and tragic end is provided, while also illuminating some of the potentials this moment still radiates.
fragments / parçalar / фрагменты / 断片
Zeynep Satir, Sari Emoto, Sinead O’Connell, Elisabeth Matiashvili
fragments / parçalar / фрагменты / 断片 is a short film series that explores the theme of belonging through the concept of the dialogical self—a view of identity as fluid, multi-voiced, and shaped by continuous dialogue between internal and external positions. Drawing on the theories of Hermans and van Meijl, the films reject the idea of a unified or coherent identity, instead embracing the ambiguity and tension that arise in multicultural, globalized lives. Through four personal stories, the work invites viewers into fleeting yet powerful moments of connection: the comfort of language, the warmth of food, the intimacy of ritual. Belonging here is not a fixed state, but an experience—partial, shifting, and deeply felt.
Visual Diary of Belonging in Exile
Gülce Cin
This project explores the notion of belonging through the visual motif of Berlin’s TV Tower. As someone who grew up in Ankara and now lives in Berlin, I was struck by the resemblance between the Atakule and the Fernsehturm. Over time, the Berlin tower became a personal compass—visible from anywhere, silently guiding me in a foreign city. Through photographing the tower from
multiple perspectives, I reflect on displacement, orientation, and memory.
Girl with a Video Camera
Sena Ünübol
Girl with a Video Camera is a short film that takes inspiration from Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), reinterpreting its observational lens through a contemporary and personal perspective. The film will follow a quiet figure, myself, moving through the city not as an active participant in its social life, but as a third eye, watching from the edges. The camera becomes both a shield and a bridge—recording without interfering, present but not involved. As a foreigner in Berlin, I often find myself in between spaces—linguistically, culturally, emotionally. The film captures those liminal moments, the quiet tension of being among people yet outside of conversation, of navigating a city that is both open and closed. Through fragmented images the work will reflect on the act of seeing as a mode of existence. Less about integration, more about witnessing.
Untitled
Hauke Steuer
Untitled captures the remnants of places in Neukölln that no longer exist—spaces that have been closed, bought out, or transformed beyond recognition. Through a juxtaposition of hand-drawn illustrations and photographs, it explores the dissonance between memory and present-day reality. Each drawing is a subjective reconstruction, an act of remembering places as they were, not as they are. In doing so, the project reflects the experience of living in a city that is constantly erasing and rebuilding itself—faster and more ruthlessly with each passing year. At its core, this is a deeply personal perspective on urban change. It quietly voices the anxiety of not being able to afford to belong in a rapidly gentrifying landscape, and the quiet grief of watching familiar spaces vanish in the name of progress. Berlin, once a haven of possibility, now seems to be racing toward a capitalist dystopia. This work asks what is lost in that race.
Visible Belongings: Traces of Transnational Identity in Berlin
Ella Ouwens
This visual research project explores how transnational identities become visible in Berlin’s public spaces—through symbols, signs, aesthetics, and sounds. Focusing on streets like Müllerstraße in Wedding and Karl-Marx-Straße in Neukölln, the project documents everyday urban scenes where cultural belonging is subtly and powerfully expressed. These visible traces tell stories of migration, community, and identity, while raising questions about visibility, recognition, and exclusion in urban landscapes.
The project invites viewers to look closer: Who is speaking through these signs? Who is being addressed? And who is not? This project offers a walk through the city’s layered cultural topography, where diasporic life, resistance, and presence leave marks in public space.
Ripples: Home is Where Your Heart Is
Megan Lindeboom
In Ripples: Home is Where Your Heart Is, Megan Lindeboom encourages the audience to engage with the feeling of wholeness with special regard to home and belonging. How much does one’s home affect one’s being? The house, built out of cotton swabs, refers to layered history as well as the meticulous process of constructing and maintaining a sanctuary to return to. Following the hearts and the (im)pulses, Lindeboom encourages you to feel home and then to feel it displaced. How does it feel to need asylum? How does it feel to leave home due to violence? The voices through the headphones detail, in their native tongues, their own experiences with displacement. Ripples compels the audience to consider how seeds of violence affect one’s livelihood as well as the complications within one’s identity whilst living in foreign lands, and on top of everything, how much strength is required to then build a home.
Meander
Alina Maurer
Meander reflects a sense of inner fragmentation between past and future, capturing the longing for belonging amid endless change. Yet through every place runs one constant: water- flowing like the hidden vein of life beneath the surface, carrying memories and gently anchoring the artist wherever she drifts.
Library
Crossings
This library is collectively curated by members of 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, and shared with the public to adopt for their own syllabi or study groups.
We are a part of your delicious
Mutfak (Frehiwot and 詩)
4am döner kebap. Insira clay vessels. A bathtub-sized container of spicy kimchi rice. From Rio to Oromo, food has played a central role in sustaining the vibrant energy of carnivals, festivals, parades, street markets and large open-air gatherings all over the world. Through collective practices of growing, harvesting, cooking and eating, food holds and carries transmissions of diasporic and intergenerational knowledges via multisensory ways. Flavors and ingredients are remixed to produce riffs on dishes that are completely altered, reinterpreted, reimagined, reworked and transformed. Yet, food is also highly contested and often used as a tool to assert a sense of authenticity, bulwark claims of origin and belonging, or feed the demands of dominant cultures, thereby reinscribing geopolitical borders and hierarchies. These ever-shifting tensions are also apparent in how food was powerfully reclaimed on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago during the late 18th century. As an act of rebellion against plantation slavery, enslaved Africans set fire to sugarcane intended as an export commodity in a ritual called Cannes Brûlées (French for “burnt sugarcane”), later known as Canboulay, and today Carnival. When the British colonial government banned sticks and drums that connected Afro-Caribbean people with ancestral relations, people turned instead to innovative percussion instruments such as the steelpan, initially repurposed from everyday kitchen objects such as frying pans, oil drums and trash can lids. Today, these sonic traces reverberate through the calypso genre and Carnival masquerades from Port of Spain to Notting Hill.
The title of this installation draws inspiration from a cardboard box of Healthy Boy oyster sauce spotted at Đồng Xuân Center in Lichtenberg. It invites viewers to ponder over questions of desire, consumption and what Kyla Wazana Tompkins terms “racial indigestion.” How can food, containers and utensils be used in improvisational and non-traditional ways?
Contributions by Kuo Roser Art Studio, Nelden Djakababa Gericke and Fazil Moradi.
Creating Belonging: Food-Sharing as a Community-Building Practice
Mascha Lange
As a consumable material, food has the capability to build a stronger community. The preparation, presentation and even the ingredients of meals reflect a concrete representation of our individual identities and offer others an opportunity to share and take part in those identities. Food allows communities to express and celebrate their individual and collective experiences. And because food is consumed, it has a power and a value surpassing other cultural objects. Every time a dish is prepared and consumed in a community, the meals offered, as well as the history, beliefs and traditions they embody, are absorbed into the bodies of all who partake. This project explores the practice of food-sharing at a micro-level, focusing on friendship and the community of student life. The collage offers a counterpiece to highly aestheticized images of food we see in advertising or social media, thus highlighting the ordinariness of our most basic human needs. It aims to highlight a practice that is essential to the building of lasting social bonds and a sense of belonging, in a society that is highly individualized and characterized by the decline of community.
Mapping the Türkiye-origin Diaspora in Berlin
Derin Kayabalı
This project explores internal tensions within the Türkiye-origin diaspora in Berlin, focusing on identity differences between Germany-born and post-2010 migrants. Through a conceptual map, the work contrasts political, cultural, and social values shaped by migration waves, from guest workers to recent arrivals fleeing political and economic instability in Türkiye. Drawing on publicly available sources and academic literature, the project visualizes how these groups relate to both Germany and Türkiye, often in conflicting ways. This concept map aims to illuminate the layered nature of diasporic identity and the fractures within a community too often seen as unified.
أهلاً وسهلاً (Ahla w Sahla) to Our Beautiful Contradictions
Linda Naddaf
أهلاً وسهلاً (Ahla w Sahla) to Our Beautiful Contradictions is a microcosmic Syrian living room, a fragment of home recreated in exile. A small corner with a chair, a table, familiar snacks and everyday Syrian objects create a sense of comfort and belonging. Clashing sounds and images emerge from the television. Pop music plays alongside breaking news of airstrikes. Traditional dances fade into footage of bombings. Soap operas are interrupted by reports of massacres. The installation reflects the inner world of many living in diaspora, where nostalgia becomes both a coping mechanism and a fragile escape. For those of us from Damascus, a city full of contradictions that is loud, dangerous, beautiful and deeply alive, these paradoxes live within us. In exile, we form hybrid identities, longing for the details of home while facing the harshness of political collapse and collective trauma. Even when we try to lose ourselves in memory, music and snacks; we are always pulled back into reality. We end up watching the same news, eating the same food, listening to the same songs. The contradictions remain. And maybe they are the closest thing we have to home.
In the Absence
Erik Günther
In the Absence captures the silence of empty urban spaces, focusing on the forgotten corners of contemporary metropolises. Drawing inspiration from the Todesstreifen—the barren no man’s land that once divided East and West Berlin—the project explores themes of absence, division, and belonging. Influenced by Edward Hopper’s depictions of modern solitude and lonely cities, it examines spaces crowded with form but empty of presence. The project asks: Do the urban spaces belong to us—or have we merely passed through them?
nhớ nhớ quên quên
Lưu Bích Ngọc
The zine nhớ nhớ quên quên explores the region of Central Vietnam through the city of Huế at the threshold of climate change, historic erasure, gentrification, and urban displacement. Blending my personal family history with a banned Vietnamese novel based on the 1968 Battle of Huế, the zine aims to translate contemporary practices of mourning and remembrance between marginalized communities in Berlin and Huế. Hand-folded, bound, and wrapped in khăn xô (gauze cloth)—a fabric traditionally used in funerals, childcare and menstrual care—the zine functions as both an alternative travel guide and a mourning object. nhớ nhớ quên quên could be developed into a broader project that involves onsite and participatory activities with local people.
Uncertain Territory
Henok Getachew Woldegebreal
Uncertain Territory explores the entangled relationship between human displacement, migration, decolonization, and globalization. The work reflects on how colonial histories—particularly the arbitrary mapping of territories in Africa—continue to shape contemporary cultures and global dynamics.
Using maps and dictionaries as central materials, I deconstruct and reassemble these once-authoritative tools to challenge their power and expose their role in erasure and division. These elements become both medium and message—symbols of instability, resistance, and redefinition.
As a migrant from the African continent, I navigate these uncertain territories daily. My lived experience informs this personal and political inquiry into how imposed systems of space and language continue to affect identity, belonging, and perception.
እኔ ውስጥ እናንተን አየሁ (I saw you within me)
Anna Frehiwot Maconi
Drawing on bell hooks' radical ethics of love in All About Love, I ask how can I make sense of a life that resists containment within the borders of a nation-state? A life shaped by what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay might call the ultimate expression of love, an undoing of imperial boundaries and inherited separations. In እኔ ውስጥ እናንተን አየሁ (I saw you within me), I turn to my family archive to reflect on my mixed-race heritage. Through this lens, I explore how care, love, and affection serve as foundational forces for building social relations that transcend boundaries of language, nationality, and class.
Calypso Comb
Claire Noa Theresin
The Calyspo Comb is the first product in the PSYCHO CALYPSO hair accessories line. It was born out of the idea of rethinking everyday objects and converting them into works of art through design. I chose the Afro comb since it carries a deep symbolic and emotional value. More than a mere tool, it is an artifact that has been used as a status symbol and embellished by ornaments since antiquity – and later, turned into a powerful symbol of resistance in the Black Liberation Movement. Afro and curly hair are a unifying feature for people of African descent. The comb—worn as a visible accessory—is intended to encourage the proud display and celebration of natural curls. It stands for the empowerment of Black culture and the restoration of pride in Black hair.
Anchor/Anker/錨/닻/くさり
Luise Hellwig & You Wu
Restaurants and cafés can be places that act as cultural and emotional anchors in big cities, offering a sense of belonging tied to a certain space. They can bring about a cultural comfort through alleviating homesickness or providing a chance to feel connected to your culture through certain practices. However, (East) Asian cultures have been increasingly commodified in Western countries like Germany. Cultural foods are turned into products divorced from the culture and people they come from, offered, marketed, and hyped for consumption on social media and elsewhere.
This project juxtaposes cultural anchors with the hypercommodified places that are proliferating in Berlin and explores what this commodification of culture could mean for us and our friends—Asians who have immigrated to Germany in recent years and second-generation Asians who grew up in Germany. Using mapping as a tool, the project aims to make visible our personal geographies and give a small insight into how we see the city and our place in it.
LM— Seeds of (post)migrant theory within a conversation among two friends
Mira Nicolovius
Through this collaborative research project, I aim to open up a conversation about doing (post)migrant theory in practice, or more specifically through dialogical interaction.
Thanks to the precious collaboration and trust gifted to the project by my dear friend Lola, the two of us are engaging in an open-ended, cross-cultural, and personal conversation about our senses of belonging, community-building possibilities, and identity (un)making within the tumultuous urban landscape of Berlin. As friends, both young women and anthropology students living in Berlin, we ask: What are our common experiences? What separates us? Is there a wall between us?
We hope to show how an “ordinary” and ephemeral occasion—such as a dinner between two friends, along with its sometimes naive conversations—can carry rich theoretical significance and complicate prevailing stereotypes.
In Transit /در گذر
Lilli J. Schlünz
In Transit / در گذر is a small-scale, experimental micro-documentary that explores the quiet, everyday moments of a cross-cultural relationship. Told through fragments of shared experiences, language, and domestic rituals, the film reflects on cultural, and physical states of “in-betweenness”—of being in transit, both literally and metaphorically. It turns away from dramatic events and instead focuses on the ordinary: cooking, peeling fruit, speaking about rain, reciting poetry and traveling together. These small, everyday gestures—subtle but full of meaning—reveal how our cultural knowledge is exchanged in intimate ways, without hierarchy or spectacle. Rather than attempting to explain or represent culture from the outside, In Transit / در گذر foregrounds the mutual nature of learning within a personal relationship. It documents how people come to understand one another through shared life, attentive presence, and care. The film chooses to focus on close-ups of hands, eyes, surroundings, and everyday spaces instead of full faces. It is accompanied by natural sound and voiceover narration.
Kaç düğüm attın ve çözdün?
Zeynep Ada Kienast
Kaç düğüm attın ve çözdün? (How many knots have you tied and untied?) was created while being in a liminal state and making peace with transitions between dualities.
Echo Archive
Bouenan Carla Irie
In Echo Archive, members of the African diaspora in Berlin guide us to places in the city that hold personal meaning. Spaces where they feel a sense of presence, memory or connection. This project aims to map Berlin through the embodiment of memories and the sounds of existence. Belonging is understood as a spatial, embodied, and sonic act. In a city that often renders African presence invisible or temporary, the individuals in this work assert their presence without explanation. Through video and sound, they become part of the memory and geography of Berlin—not in loud protest, but in persistent, grounded, and unapologetic presence.
The Sweet Smell of Apples
Asrin Mahmood
Using a personal family archive of old tapes and photos, I examine how second-generation individuals like myself inherit fragmented histories shaped by violence and displacement. In my short film, the act of peeling an apple overlays family memories—invoking The Sweet Smell of Apples, a haunting reminder of the chemical attacks on Kurds. My project explores how language conveys and distorts inherited trauma, particularly through the concept of “speaking in war.” By layering past and present through sound and imagery, my short film highlights how historical trauma lingers across generations, shaping identity and belonging.
sus/pen/ded
İdil Gündüz
This collage piece brings together visual fragments from Turkey and Germany to reflect on the fractured experience of existing between two worlds. Cut images, layered textures, scattered words, and everyday materials form a landscape of disorientation and unrest, where vivid colors and sharp compositions evoke a sense of urgency, anxiety, and rage. The piece resists settling or resolution, embracing rupture and tension as its ground.
