Müge: When you start living in a new place, sometimes people suddenly demonstrate to you the fluidity of belonging. You then recognize that you can also belong somewhere through common past experiences, and that sometimes these experiences do not even need to be shared at the exact same time or at the exact same place.  Nazlı: We first met at an event of a migrant women’s organization in Berlin, but we

Text: Zeynep Disbudak & Burçin Tetik  Photography: Zeynep Disbudak  “Does it feel any different?” I asked Burçin as I was embarking on the journey which she, on paper, has completed, while fearing to ask the main question, “will it ever feel any different?” Upon this, we decided to walk the path she did every year until she received her citizenship.  We have spent a day sitting in front of Ausländerbehörde*,

Have you ever been curious about how animations and stop motions are created? In this 2-day workshop, we will go through the different steps of creating a short stop motion film and will also practice magical techniques of stop motion. We will also work in pairs to collaboratively create a story using the stop motion technique.  Procedure: The first meeting will take place online on Zoom, where you will learn

Judith Albrecht works as a social anthropologist and documentary filmmaker in Germany and abroad. For her fieldwork and film projects she spent long periods of time in Iran, Tanzania and Malawi. After the Libyan revolution she started to work with the Libyan women’s movement…

Lena is a Russian artist and urban sketcher based in Berlin and Freiburg, Germany. She loves unveiling tales of different cities and their inhabitants by capturing them on paper. Architecture and city silhouettes play a leading role in her drawings…

Pınar Özütemiz is a storyteller from Turkey. In 2018, she graduated from the Masters programme of “Künstlerisches Erzahlen – Storytelling in Art and Education” at UdK Berlin…

As a cooperation project of the Tempelhof-Schöneberg city library, the Encounters media workshop has access to professional photo, video and sound equipment. Staff members of the Tempelhof Schöneberg city library requested a workshop that would equip them with the know-how for handling this equipment in the long-term. A project idea was quickly developed: “Cuddly Toy Sleepover – The Movie”…

The experimental short film is a poetic journey through an archive created by the film makers during the pandemic, which consists of videos, images, thoughts and feelings accompanying them in that time. In addition, the Berlin-based protagonists coming from the electronic music scene give an insight into their work and experiences during Corona.

A Kiezstory by Nadim Helow, Jens Fischer Rodrian & Encounters media workshop. Berlin 2020 2020 will be remembered as a year of dramatic changes for billions of people. No superlative seems big enough to describe the ongoing sociopolitical and cultural challenge facing global society. State decisions have a deep impact on the lives of people who have to come to terms with a “new normality”. What do people say who

I was sitting in the nature, watching the clouds passing by and watching the trees and myself taking in the good sunlight and heat. That was the first time I felt my skin and eyes are exactly the same type of receptor as the surface of the leaves. Since then I have the idea that I sense my atmosphere as much as it senses me.

Dagmar Giesecke, translated by Jenny Rosenberg There’s more going on in public libraries than just reading. For a few years now “reading rooms” (as they were called in their early days) have been expanding their offerings. The same is happening at the “Maria Buch” central library in Tempelhof’s Götzstraße. In a four-hour period on July 14th, one such offering took place – in the garden and with beautiful weather, appropriate for

Sabrina Mainz This project was developed in the Encounters media workshop: “Women tell stories through photography” by Luiza Folegatti and Ina Schebler, 2019.

Text: Zeynep Disbudak & Burçin Tetik  Photography: Zeynep Disbudak  “Does it feel any different?” I asked Burçin as I was embarking on the journey which she, on paper, has completed, while fearing to ask the main question, “will it ever feel any different?” Upon this, we decided to walk the path she did every year until she received her citizenship.  We have spent a day sitting in front of Ausländerbehörde*,

I have been looking forward to the book “The Kids from the Refugee home” by Cool Kids & Hoa Mai Trần with illustrations by Michaela Schultz for a long time. It‘s a wonderful read!

It was about one year ago that I became aware of the wonderful paintings by Viennese artist Peter Kokoefer. For months, I had been searching for a painter whose artwork could enrichen my upcoming book of poems. Peter and I had already met years before, at the closing of a film project led by our mutual friend and filmmaker Judith Albrecht…

During a cold but sunny morning of the Berlin winter, Martin Marion, actor, musician and composer, delighted us with his voice and his guitar. He combines his skills as a theater and film actor with his ability to compose in order to reflect small but transformative facts of life. In the middle of the pandemic, in a lonely library, among the book shelves, he reminded us that despite how difficult

By Andrei Cucu The Encounters Surrealist Web Chat is an experiment in verbal communication happening between languages and between people that transcends semantics. Starting from the idea of the exquisite corpse, the surrealist word game where participants need to continue a text without knowing what the preceding participant wrote, the project develops the idea further, each participant receiving a message in a language they don’t understand and replying in their mother tongue.