The ENCOUNTERS media workshops
The Encounter network is exploring new and exciting paths: together with the public library Tempelhof-Schöneberg and the Mauerpark Institut e.V. we are launching the Encounters media workshops.
In this multi-media community project the encounter still makes up the centerpiece of our work. We will host numerous workshops and events at the different library locations of the public library Tempelhof-Schöneberg in order to bring people together to collaborate in media productions such as texts, illustrations, photo-, music- and video-projects, soundscapes, podcasts, graphic novels, and much more.
Stay tuned! Everyone who is interested can become a media professional with us!
As a civil society initiative of social anthropologists and students of Freie Universität Berlin, artists, activists and media professionals from many different countries, we share a common goal with our project partners: we want to promote the public library as a space of encounters and of creative, collaborative media work in the sense of our encounter network.
Random encounters between the book shelves, between people of various social, cultural, religious and political backgrounds, between generations, between newcomers and the old-established – we want to offer an opportunity in Tempelhof-Schöneberg to establish these and thus to help shape an active, well-informed and media-savvy community.
Our approach is based on team work: we exchange different perspectives, creative techniques and languages (currently German, English, Arabic, Farsi). We work experimentally, self-reflectively and critically.
Contributions from our workshops and events are continously posted on our blog, and published in our print magazine, presented in exhibitions and other formats. Some of them focus on the subject of the encounter, others reflect on encounters within the process of their development. Some contributions combine both approaches.
We are convinced, that encounters allow us to better understand and comprehend diversity and also to endure and negotiate differences of opinions in a better way. Every encounter starts with yourself, with another person, with a new idea, or with something strange at first; it contains the unusual, the exciting, unlocks potential and creates pleasure.
Join us and follow the Encounters media workshops on our new paths through Tempelhof-Schöneberg! We are looking forward to meeting you!
Our Team
Because the internet is a public space and not always safe, some of our team members don´t want to appear with a picture and a short CV.
Judith Albrecht
Project MastermindJudith 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 in Benghazi. The thematic focus of her work is gender and religion, social movements, conflict, violence and memory. The co-founder of the project group “Deutsch im Asyl” and “Memos e.V.” employs diverse approaches in the investigation of social and political upheavals and the impact it has on the life stories and biographies of the people involved. Her recent research project focuses on “Grief, trauma and social justice in Germany”.
Boryano Rickum
Head of the public libraries Tempelhof-SchönebergBoryano Rickum comes from an Indonesian-French family and studied Political Science, History and International Technical and Economic Cooperation at the RWTH Aachen University. He completed his studies in 2005 with a thesis on the question of nationbuilding in Indonesia. Since then Boryano has called Berlin his home, and worked there from 2008 to 2011 for Watch Indonesia!, an organisation promoting democracy, human rights and environmental protection in Indonesia and East Timor. In 2011 he finally obtained his PhD from the RWTH Aachen University in Political Studies on “The Japanese Occupation in the National Culture of Remembrance in Indonesia.” Since 2014 he has been the responsible head of the public libraries first in the district Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (2014-2017) and then now in Tempelhof-Schöneberg, Berlin.
Youn-Zuh Rim
PROJECT COORDINATORYoun-Zuh Rim studied international business administration in Dortmund. She is interested in culture, languages and interpersonal cooperation. In the 70ties her parents emigrated from South Korea to Germany. Hence she was born and raised in Wiesbaden. She lived and worked in Shanghai for almost 6 years to learn the Chinese culture and language. Since she moved to Berlin she worked as a volunteer with a Syrian family and she provided organizational and communicative support for a collaborative platform. Since end of September 2020 she is coordinating the Encounters media workshops.
Alvaro Martinez
Art DirectorAlvaro Martínez, is a Berlin based visual artist, illustrator and anthropologist from Bolivia. He studied anthropology in Bolivia and focused his research on ritualistic and symbolic-healing among Aymaras in the city of La Paz. As an illustrator his experience is focused in book illustration, graphic novel and character design. His illustrations were published in the Major University San Andrés of La Paz, where he published the graphic novel “La Chaskañawi” in 2012 and designed the image for the international colloquium “Roland Barthes Amateur”. He is the co-creator of the illustrated world of Rokooko and worked for the Spanish Editorial Santillana. He was graduated at the Pictoplasma Academy of Berlin and his work has been exhibited at the Urban Spree gallery and White Concepts Gallery in Berlin. His illustrations were showed at the Maxim Gorki Theater of Berlin.
Sarah Fichtner
Project coordinator (JULY 2019 UNTIL SEPTEMBER 2020)Sarah Fichtner was born in Berlin, where she works as a social and cultural anthropologist doing text- and film-based ethnographic research, evaluations and consultancies in the fields of education (especially teacher trainings in learner-centred pedagogies in West-, Central Africa and Germany) and flight and migration (particularly focusing on young children in refugee homes in Germany, and LGBTIQ* refugees). Currently she works at the FiBS. She has also been the project coordinator of the Medienwerkstatt Encounters between July 2019 and September 2020.
Mina Aghalouie
Editor FarsiMina comes from Iran,Tehran. Currently studying Master of communication design at HMKW Berlin. She joined the workshop picturing Encounter2017 as an Illustrator and now is working as a part of Encounter editorial team for Farsi language. She likes also to draw, illustrate and animate.
Joanna Mitchell
Editor English & GermanJoanna has a degree in biology and works as a freelance translator, proofreader and environmental educator. She speaks English, German and Greek and is very much interested in how language shapes our sense of belonging. She joined the Encounters editorial team in late 2019 and is still enjoying the challenge.
Brooj Al-Ammari
Editor ArabicBrooj is an architect who grew up in Sana’a and lived in many cities before Berlin. She became part of Encounters as part of the translation team, two months after she arrived to Berlin. She is interested in community development and working on participatory processes for community-led design and activities.
Ina Schebler
Ina Schebler films, writes, takes photos and studies Visual and Media Anthropology in Berlin. In her work, she focuses on political topics. Since 2015, she has been involved in several projects concerned with various topics related to forced migration. These include for instance work with rejected asylum seekers in Amsterdam, people who fled to Germany after World War II, and asylum seekers as well as volunteers in refugee camps on the Greek island Chios.
Franziska Knierim
Franziska Knierim was born in Berlin but grew up in the countryside. She is a student of Social and Cultural Anthropology and Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin. She joined the Encounters team via the workshop “Picturing Encounter”. When it comes to encounters between people, she is more interested in the common grounds and similarities than in the differences that come to light She speaks German, English, some Turkish and just started to learn Farsi.
Hama Zangana
Hama comes from Kirkuk, Iraq and has been living in Berlin as a refugee since 2015. Hama joined Encounter in 2018 and is specialized in illustration, translation, and giving safe space workshops to discuss cultural and religious issues. He speaks Kurdish, Arabic, English, German, Turkmenish/Turkish.
Zeynep Disbudak
Editor TurkishZeynep is a fellow creature who was born and raised in Istanbul and ended up in Berlin in 2015. Enjoyed being involved in various interdisciplinary projects, she currently works for international film festivals and cultural institutes. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Sociology from Bogazici University and she has recently finished up her master’s thesis in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Free University of Berlin. She is fluent in Turkish, German and English and has basic conversational skills in Arabic and Italian.
Mojtaba Parvaneh
Mojtaba is an Iranian User Interface designer and Content Creator with aMasters degree in Advertising and Corporate Communication from the University of Milan (UNIMI).He worked as a photographer and graphic designer at newspaper and advertising companies in Iran. He came to Freie Universität Berlin as an Erasmus student where he got to know Judith Albrecht, and started his cooperation with Encounters workshops as a cameraman and video editor in the ”Kiezstory” project. Mojtaba also is the winner of the design competition,Lombardia Design Hubwhich took place in Milan in December 2018. He has recently launched a royalty-free stock photos and videos website which focuses on telling advertising storieson Instagram.
Lilas Al Loulou
Editor ArabicLilas Alloulou is from Syria, where she studied English Literature. In 2014 she started working with refugees in Egypt, where she completed her training as a psychosocial worker. She continued her work in Germany when she moved to Berlin in 2015. She is active in various projects and has been working with the editorial team of the magazine since its establishment. She is currently absolving a BA program with double concentration (Ethics and Politics / Art and Aesthetics) at Bard College Berlin.
Victoria Sakti
Victoria Sakti is a social and cultural anthropologist whose work draws on her multidisciplinary and intercultural background. Having spent her formative years in Indonesia, in the USA, and in Europe, she is keen in exploring the linkages of transnational migration, memory and their related emotions in her collaboration with the Encounter-blog. She is co-founder and chairperson of Mauerpark Institute and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. Her current research project is a multi-sited ethnographic study of ‘ageing in exile’ in the case of East Timorese diasporas.
Thomas Stodulka
Thomas Stodulka’s work focuses on studying childhood and youth, stigma, marginality, and the interplay between culture, emotion, mental health, and illness. He conducted long-term fieldwork with street-related young men in Yogyakarta, Indonesia between 2001 and 2015 and he has directed various interdisciplinary research projects on the role of emotions and affects in ethnographic knowledge production. Beyond academia, he is a founding member of the Mauerpark Institut Berlin e.V, an independent cinema-café in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a shelter for chronically ill youth and he is a proud associate of the Milas Vegetarian Restaurant and Workroom Yogyakarta (since 2001).
Lotte Knote
Lotte Knote is an anthropologist who was born in Berlin and who recently joined the encounter-project. She studied African studies, Swahili and social and cultural anthropology in Berlin, London, Zanzibar and Lamu. Her research interests focus on social and political processes of the Kenyan and Tanzanian Swahili coast. Her passion for ethnographic and poetic filmmaking is rooted deeply in the potential she sees in communicating social and political issues through visually engaging images to a global audience. She is currently mainly engaging in topics such as postcolonialism, intersectional feminism and social justice and has worked as volunteer and freelance researcher, editor and translator.
Irina Savu-Cristea
Irina is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Free University Berlin, focusing on emotions and self-making practices among girls in a school in Bali. She discovered anthropology “at home”, in Romania. Since then, she became interested in developing collaborative research methods and conducted ethnographic fieldwork in 2 high-schools (Bucharest & Berlin). She is also a team coach certified in the Action Reflection Learning® methodology and was involved in several educational projects facilitating synergic teacher-student-parent teams in Romanian high-schools. She is passionate about teams and enjoys organizing public encounters associated to our blog and magazine.
Sadaf Farahani
Sadaf Farahani is a filmmaker, cultural activist and translator based in Berlin. She worked as staff photographer for several newspapers and magazines in Iran and as a freelance photojournalist/author with various international media before she moved to Germany in 2011. She is involved and very interested in immigration and integration related issues.
Sadek Bouzinou
Sadek Bouzinou is an engaged artist from Algeria. As an urban sociologist, he is used to observe the social phenomena of his country. Thanks to his music, the leader of the Algerian Reggae band Democratoz became a spokesperson of the Algerian youth. Through images, sound and text, he speaks up for the cause of migrants, education, and the environment. Recently, Sadek has attracted attention as a film-maker, giving a voice to the most vulnerable in his clips and short films.
Elnaz Mostaan
Editor FarsiElnaz is a social and cultural activist coming from Iran and living in Germany since 2016. She has a Bachelor in Civil Engineering and a Masters in Architectural and Cultural Heritage. In her research, she studied the forms of community participation through intangible cultural heritage in Berlin. She is a fan of collective work which encourages creativity and movement, and that is what connected her to “Encounter”.
Ladan Nobijari
Editor FarsiLadan was born in Tehran, Iran. She has been living in Berlin since 2009. She has a Master’s degree in Process Engineering and is a member of the Encounters editorial team for Farsi.
Nadine Krüger
Editor English & GermanNadine grew up in a small town in the Spreewald region of Germany and has been living in Berlin since 2017, where she studies Social and Cultural Anthropology and English Philology at Freie Universität. She joined the Encounter network as part of an internship at the end of 2019, and is now a member of the editorial team and responsible for German and English translations. She is fluent in German and English and has some knowledge of Swahili, Spanish and French. Her interest in the ways in which language influences our perception of the world and one another, connects her especially to Encounters’ multilingual approach.
All visual conception of the Medienwerkstatt Encounters project by StudioAbashi. Logo designed in 2017 by Golnar Kat and modified by StudioAbashi in 2019.