The FLINTA* Kultur Salon reclaims and rethinks Berlin’s tradition of feminist salons as radical spaces for encounter, resistance, and collective growth. In four interdisciplinary and intersectional events in 2026, the series centers the voices and works of FLINTA* authors, poetry performers, actors, playwrights, and musicians with migration backgrounds who live in Berlin. Through interdisciplinary, cross-genre artistic practices rooted in word and language, they explore themes such as identity, uprooting, autonomy, and solidarity.

Historically, Berlin salons were spaces for intellectual and cultural exchange outside rigid social and political structures. Led by salonnières —mostly Jewish women— they brought together artists, writers, and thinkers often excluded elsewhere, offering a home for the exiled and the shunned. Yet, these spaces remained largely elite, inaccessible to working-class people, migrants, queer and trans individuals, and those lacking social or educational capital.

This event series fundamentally expands the legacy of historical salons by creating access and participation for artists and audiences affected by intersectional disadvantages and discrimination. It continues the intent of the salonnières, not by replicating their spaces, but by realigning their purpose, to establish conditions in which collective rethinking and joint action become possible, preserving Berlin’s role as a vibrant, accessible European cultural hub that hosts and supports artists from both Germany and abroad.

This is particularly crucial at a time when these conditions, affordable living and working spaces, artistic freedom, equal participation, gender justice, and more, are increasingly threatened or politicized.

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FLINTA* KULTURSALON #1

Focus and themes: This evening explores the postfeminist female gaze as a site of friction, demonstrating how gendered ways of seeing can be dissolved, redirected, or used as resistance through artistic expression. All contributions engage with questions of embodiment, voice, and visibility across genres and disciplines: from performance and sound to visual narratives and hybrid text forms. What becomes visible, or even speakable, through a female or queer gaze? Can poetic or performative forms disrupt the hierarchy between subject and object, observer and observed? How are desire, vulnerability, or eroticism renegotiated when reclaimed by those who have historically been objectified?

Program:

Author and filmmaker Marjan Sareh (Iran) presents a poetic-linguistic work that blends surreal realism with Persian poetry, exploring the inner lives of women under systems they did not create.

Alevi-Turkish poet Zeynep Cekinmez proposes a poetic intervention focusing on the postmigrant feeling of being in-between and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora.

Swiss-based performer and director Elsa Cailletaud and flutist Flora Karetka present Anti-blasons, a feminist and queer reinterpretation of 16th-century body-focused poetry fragments, developed as a site-specific performance.

Digital storyteller and musician Ruoming Zhao (China) performs Silence Ball: Digital Mother, a speculative-feminist sci-fi dream-pop performance based on her bilingual novel.

Moderation: Ioana Cristina Casapu

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FLINTA* KULTURSALON is a project by FLINTA* Literatur, Berlin’s platform for migrant and exiled womxn artists, in cooperation with Lettrétage, funded by the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt, recommended by The Reader Berlin and presented by tip Berlin.‍

Contact: kontakt@flintaliteratur.de

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