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.

Clove and nutmeg, levity and loss.

From African Shamanism to Icelandic elves, we ruminate on ancestral relations, animal spirits and ghostly apparitions as a part of life in our conversation with writer, psychologist and jewelry maker Nelden Djakababa Gericke. In a forthcoming collection of interconnected short stories, Nelden traces the circularity of Berlin's Ringbahn and the lives of Southeast Asian womxn living inside and outside of the Ring. Horror and magical realism serve as a vehicle for bridging the spatial ghosts of a city with personal and collective traumas that have yet to be resolved. Reflecting upon her experiences working with teenagers and women in internally displaced camps on the Maluku Islands, Nelden shares a pivotal moment when she realized the necessity of creating space for the organic, spontaneous emergence of communities of care. On loop and repeat, stories continue to be written and rewritten, as they find a home in a ghost story or steampunk-inspired earrings.

Listen to Nelden’s soundtracks for train tracks on the S41/S42 Ringbahn in Berlin or elsewhere.

• Always room for dessert:

• https://sangkala-innerjewel.de/

• https://www.tempo.co/

• https://suedostasien.net/amp/

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32086052/

• https://www.yayasanpulih.org/

• https://www.youtube.com/c/CozyStreetCorner

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBQEBwYqXaw

• https://www.berlin.de/sen/kultgz/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/2025/pressemitteilung.1523378.php

With Guest: Nelden Djakababa Gericke is a talented fiction writer and a trained psychologist from Indonesia who pursued an advanced master’s degree in Cultures and Development Studies in Belgium. With extensive experience in trauma recovery and community-based psychological intervention in Indonesia, Nelden further enriched her knowledge through a research fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School. Eventually, Nelden and her family moved to Vilnius, Lithuania, and Berlin, Germany. She adeptly combines her passions for jewelry crafting, psychology, trauma work, and writing by conducting workshops alongside her mental health work. In addition, she contributes as a freelance writer for Tempo magazine in Indonesia. She played a vital role in the core editorial team for a recently published edition of Südostasien, an online magazine based in Cologne focusing on current issues in Southeast Asia.