CATALYZING COEXISTENCE CHAPTER 2: DIS/CONTINUITIES

How can trust endure when diversity itself becomes politicized?

The second chapter of Catalyzing Coexistence, “DIS/CONTINUITIES” focuses on the fractures and interruptions that exist within the walls and sees them as possibilities for new connections, those that are not necessarily guided by common discourse but instead engage with imagination, creativity, and ancestrality as modes of living when life itself is devoid of ground.

Moving away from “discourse” as something formal and exercised through reasoning to more artistic, incomplete, vulnerable and fragmented formats, “DIS/CONTINUITIES” asks: how can we reclaim and strengthen collective alliances, political action and artistic imagination across different identities, particularly those complex and conflicting senses of “self” that migration creates?

One answer might lie in listening. Not “listening” as something romanticized, a flattened mode of attention. Rather, a listening that engages with the unsaid, with the absence of words, with the little pauses that happen when one switches languages. A listening to the infrasonic frequencies of living within the walls.

The contributions to the discourse program engage with artistic, sonic, and scholarly forms of addressing these questions, while also speculating on and rehearsing modes of working from the fractures, gaps, breaks, and interruptions on ways of living and being together in diaspora, across past, present, and future.

With: Sara Mikolai, Viviane Tabach, and Tiara Roxanne.
Co-Curated by: Pedro Oliveira.

How to participate

DIS/CONTINUITIES is a free admission gathering, but registration is required due to limited capacity.

The event is primarily supported by the IMPACT Program of the Berlin Senate. Like many independently organized cultural projects, the funding often only partially covers the overall production costs. While a large part of the programme is supported, some aspects of the gathering, including food preparation, additional production needs, and the collective labour surrounding the event, still need to be sustained through self organization, donations, and community support.

To help sustain these shared practices and make the gathering possible, we warmly encourage donations starting from 10€.

Please register by filled these form below :

Program

Existing on Thresholds: On Dance in the Tamil Diaspora and the Suspensions of Belonging

by Sara Mikolai

This performance reflects on the transformative capacity of embodied and sonic practice as modalities of belonging beyond national identity. Drawing on Sara Mikolai’s lived experience as a Tamil-German within the Tamil diasporic community in Berlin, the work approaches dance as a formative communal practice and listening as an active methodology.

Through personal reflection and broader questions of positionality, the performance challenges divisive constructions of nationhood, identity, class, and aesthetic politics. It frames the marginalization of the Tamil diaspora not only through disenfranchisement and fragility, but also through resilience, privacy, and the negotiation of belonging within social structures that often refuse recognition.

Dance and sound become tools to reconfigure perception, connection, and the understanding of self and other.

Who Keeps the Key? Towards Collective Practices

by Viviane Tabach

This contribution explores curatorial strategies for shaping spaces of encounter, exchange, and collective creation. Through selected case studies, including the project space Co-Making Matters at Haus der Statistik, Viviane Tabach reflects on collaborative processes, their conditions, responsibilities, and expectations.

The presentation looks at the negotiations, tensions, and forms of care that emerge when working across different contexts and positions. It asks how collective practices can hold multiple perspectives, forms of knowledge, and relationships between participants.

Moving between discourse and collective exercise, the session invites participants to reflect on modes of collaboration through questions and small gestures. The material created during this process will continue beyond the event as material for further thinking and exchange in the next programs.

Automated Extraction at the Borderlands: Haunting Back

by Tiara Roxanne

Automated Extraction at the Borderlands: Haunting Back is a lecture performance exploring how automated technologies shape memory, movement, and belonging within the borderlands.

Audiences will be invited into collective and embodied moments where repetition, voice, and presence become forms of collective body memory, a key element of Digital Attunement. Grounded in Indigenous methodologies and Dr. Tiara Roxanne’s ongoing research on Digital Attunement and The Technological Haunt, the performance asks how we might move beyond being passive recipients of technological extraction.