JÎN* IN DIASPORA

JÎN* IN DIASPORA is a collaboration of young Kurdish migrants from Vienna.

The lives of women*, lesbian*s, intersex, nonbinary and trans people in the Kurdish diaspora are characterized by multi-layered mechanisms of oppression and conflicting expectations in the process of finding identity.

Migrant. Minority. Exotic female* fighter. Kurd. FLINT*. These identities are political and manifest complex power dynamics. This project tackles expectations posed from the outside and personal experiences between the here and there, the inside and the outside, in the framework of a podcast series and a performance.

Therefore, contemporary dance, rap and slam poetry flow together with traditional stylistic devices such as Denbêj. Dêngbej’s aesthetic form resembles rap and slam poetry respectively and created an epic tradition in the sense of oral history allocated in the Kurdish regions of Turkey’s east. Hence a collective memory came into being that simultaneously was a form of resistance.

This tradition is reinterpreted in the context of JÎN* IN DIASPORA by processing individual and collective experiences.