Politics of Heartbreak #1 + #2

Venue: HAU1

18:00 #1 Finding Home in Becoming StrangersWith SEYYARE Anatolian Women's Choir, Ece Temelkuran, Sham Jaff, parallel society

around 8:30pm #2 Mourning as ResistanceWith Rebel-is-hah! Collective/Azadeh Ganjeh, Simin Jawabreh, Kubra Khademi, Sham Jaff, Tatreez Berlin

Part of the “Vessel of Love” as part of “Love is a Verb #2”

18:00 #1 Finding Home in Becoming StrangersStart: SEYYARE Anatolian Women's ChoirKeynote: Ece Temelkuran with Sham Jaff (Moderation) Spoken Word Performance: “A SPACE OF DIS/APPEARANCE” by parallel society (Armeghan Taheri & Ken Yamamoto)

around 8:30pm #2 Mourning as ResistanceElecture Performance: Rebel-is-hah! Collective/ Azadeh Ganjeh “Not a Body for Burial” Discussion Group: Azadeh Ganjeh, Simin Jawabreh and Kubra Khademi with Sham Jaff (Moderation) All evening: Tatreez Berlin: Embroidering together against the heartbreak

“Politics of Heartbreak” are three events in the “Vessel of Love” that combine lectures and discussions with performative interventions and music. Internationally active authors, journalists, activists and artists who work on political affects, foreignness, authoritarianism and racism, feminist anti-colonial and diasporic movements come together in the “Vessel of Love” at HAU1 to discuss the political dimensions of our current heartbreaks. The festival's questions about resilience and joint care work are enriched by international experience from Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Palestine, Iran and Turkey and brought into the Berlin context. The conversations are framed and expanded by music and performances, which aesthetically bring into space what words are unable to express and make us empathize with others' heartbreak. Between political analysis, performance and singing, the central question of “Love is a Verb” unfolds: How does heartbreak change from a private feeling to a political state that connects us?

Prelude: SEYYARE Anatolian Women's ChoirThe SEYYARE Anatolian Women's Choir was created from spontaneous singing together at a funeral and was founded by women with migration and exile experience. A shared loss thus became a collective sound — and a space in which strangeness and belonging are renegotiated.

Keynote: Ece Temelkuran From the experience of singing together, the evening leads to a political and personal look at loss and alienation. Lawyer, writer, and journalist Ece Temelkuran knows the anatomy of authoritarianism — and the heartbreak that remains when a country becomes foreign. After years of critical reporting on the Erdoğan government and Kurdistan, she left Turkey in 2016. In her book “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship” (2019), she dissects how democracies are gradually falling apart; with “Nation of Strangers: We Are Our Homeland” (2026), a deeply personal but also political view of the world, she finds in letters to unknown people — potentially to all of us — a literary language in which the loss of belonging can be shared and shared from Strangeness creates a new connection.

Discussion: Ece Temelkuran and Sham JaffiFollowing her keynote speech, Ece Temelkuran talks to journalist Sham Jaff and opens up her personal and literary perspective for joint exchange. As a journalist, Sham Jaff moderates podcasts on the topics of migration, racism and their intersectional and global dynamics, focusing on the perspective of those affected. Since 2014, she has been writing the newsletter “What happened last week”, a weekly compilation of news, voices and perspectives from and about Asia, Africa and Latin America

Spoken Word Performance: “A SPACE OF DIS/APPEARANCE” by parallel society (Armeghan Taheri & Ken Yamamoto) Based on Mahmoud Darwish's poem “Think of the Others” and Hannah Arendt's Thought of Plurality, Armeghan Taheri approaches freedom as a fragile body — between political fronts, media overcontrol and the limits of what can be said. Language becomes material that resists under pressure. Ken Yamamoto's sound of drones, noise and fragmented sampling picks up on this tension without smoothing it out and focuses on disturbances. The result is an open performance in which the political risks of language become perceptible. Parallelgesellschaft is a post-German, intersectional artist collective that has been working at the interface of critical literary formats, curatorial practice and political-poetic intervention since 2017.