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.

• Panel — Framing Democracy: Power, Populism, and the Politics of Image
• With Ertuğ Tombuş and Özlem Sarıyıldız.
• Hosted by Yaren Konca and Duygu Nural.

• Crossings
• 18–20 July 2025
• Refuge Worldwide, NM1 — Niemetzstraße 1, 12055 Berlin

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.

Ertuğ Tombuş is the deputy director of the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy and a Research Associate at the Department of Social Sciences, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Between 2017–2020, he was the academic coordinator of the Blickwechsel: Contemporary Turkey Studies Program at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Before joining Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, he taught at Columbia University, The New School Eugene Lang College for Liberal Arts, Western Connecticut State University, and the State University of New York. He is the managing editor of Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory since 2009.

Özlem Sarıyıldız is a visual artist, documentary filmmaker, and editor. She pursued Industrial Design (BA) and Media and Cultural Studies (MS) at Middle East Technical University, Türkiye, and worked as a research assistant at McGill University in Montréal under the Jeanne Sauvé scholarship. Currently, she is the artistic co-director of the HIER & JETZT: Connections (HUJ:C) residency and exchange program for artists in exile in Berlin. Using primarily audio-visual materials, oral history tools, and focusing on gender, displacement, and the commons, her work uncovers the mechanisms underlying power dynamics and aligns with the determined voices seeking to reshape the course of history.

• Filmed by Megan Lindeboom and Julianne Chua
• Sound recorded by Chali
• Edited by Megan Lindeboom

This panel discussion was recorded live at Refuge Worldwide NM1 on 19 July 2025. Also available as a video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ha536jEozKg

Funded by the Humboldt-Universitäts-Gesellschaft (HUG), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the State of Berlin as part of the Excellence Strategy of the Federal and State Governments by the Berlin University Alliance.