Navigating Trust and Suspicion in Diasporic Realities
A long-term curatorial process by sōydivision (2025–2027)
Where This Begins
TRUSPICION did not begin as a neatly framed concept. It began as a low, constant vibration — a grassroots anxiety many of us carry as diasporic bodies trying to stay afloat in Berlin. A feeling that trust is thinning, suspicion is thickening, and every crisis — political, ecological, economic — folds into the next.
Instead of performing stability, we chose to stay with instability and observe what it is doing to us.
Supported by the Berlin Senate’s Basisförderung – Visual Arts, TRUSPICION unfolds as a three-year arc. Not as a rigid program, but as a living conversation shaped by our immediate surroundings and the emotional weather of our community.
From our base in Schöneweide, where sōydivision is rooted, we respond to global polycrises through locally grounded, grassroots action. Large-scale instability is always experienced in small, embodied ways. Our work translates that instability into collective listening, shared space, and relational practice.
2025 — Fractured Foundations
The first year looked outward, tracing how colonial histories, migration regimes, and institutional gatekeeping shape who is trusted and who is surveilled.
Key formats included Soy&Synth, Empathonic, and the group exhibition Landslide at Novilla in collaboration with Movingpoets e.V..
Landslide explored displacement and precarity through sound and installation, treating collapse not as spectacle but as slow erosion — structural, emotional, infrastructural. Grounded in Schöneweide while connected translocally, it asked how systemic distrust shapes artistic survival and belonging. EN_kurator concept (1)
2025 established the condition: historical fractures are not past events — they are ongoing environments.
2026 — Within the Walls
In 2026, the lens turns inward.
If distrust is historically imposed, how does it operate inside our own diasporic communities? Shared struggle does not automatically produce solidarity. Internal hierarchies of class, language, migration status, and generation shape proximity and exclusion.
Two major projects anchor this chapter:
Catalyzing Coexistence, supported by the Berlin Senate Diversity Impact Project, builds frameworks for dialogue, public negotiation, and intra-diasporic exchange.
ALI(E/A)NASI, a continuation of Landslide, examines relational instability. The title folds multiple meanings — alliance (aliansi), alienation (alienasi), foreignness, and everyday sustenance (nasi). It asks how alliances are formed while alienation persists, and how solidarity can be nourished without denying friction.
Together, these projects move from structural critique to relational negotiation.
2027 — Futures of Trust (In Progress)
The third year remains intentionally open.
Rather than defining it prematurely, we allow it to emerge from what the previous years reveal. The direction leans toward speculative trust — imagining models of solidarity that do not rely on institutional validation but are collectively improvised.
2027 is still listening, testing, studying.
Growing Sideways
Across these years, sōydivision is mutating toward something closer to a study group — a porous, collective learning space where art becomes shared knowledge-making rather than product.
Instead of growing upward, we grow sideways.
Becoming many instead of becoming big.
Multiplying care, co-existence, and co-creation in uncertain times.
TRUSPICION is not a manifesto.
It is simply where we find ourselves — trying to stay human, stay connected, and keep listening while the ground keeps shifting.
Maybe that is enough.
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