Festival
Once We Were Trees, Now We Are Birds

Once We Were Trees, Now We Are Birds is about transformation – not only from one life form to another, but also within an individual’s life, when beginning again in a new place. Here, transformation is not just a metaphor but a lived experience.

In their performances, the invited artists explore how the body absorbs and responds to transformation, turning it into storytelling and offering the audience more than testimony.

Letters Home, a performance by Alena Starostina and Ivan Nikolaev, is built from fragmented diary notes collected over the past two and a half years, since the authors left Russia and moved to Germany. Two of its four parts are unfolded for this festival, offering a deeply personal reflection on the precarious notions of home, language, memory and future.

In Run Fast, Bite Hard, Elisabete Finger explores the possibilities of interaction and cooperation between different species and their heterogeneous presences. Dante Buu will present a durational performance on the festival’s second day, and Sujatro Ghosh will close the programme with an interactive food-based performance.

The performances presented at the festival explore the body as a site of transformation – a place where experiences of forced migration and displacement are translated into performative expressions. In this suspended state – wings folded yet ready to unfold – the artists navigate shifting geographies, languages, and memories, embodying the tension between rupture and resilience.

Flying Backward takes off from Germany — not as an endpoint, but as the beginning of a reverse journey. Like a bird tracing its path across skies and borders, the selection of films hovers over different geographies with a bird’s-eye view, observing the echoes of displacement, memory, and survival.

The festival’s film section opens with Igor Vidor’sA Praga. Set in the tranquil German town of Obersdorf am Neckar, the film explores the local arms industry’s presence there. By layering archival footage from Latin American regions where these weapons have been exported for centuries, the work encourages us to contemplate the economy of war.

Vahid Zarezadeh’s film A Sound of Silence delves into the aftermath of the Iran–Iraq war, portraying Iranian soldiers whose mental health has deteriorated due to the conflict. Through a poetic lens, the film captures their silenced stories and the devastating effects of war on communities.

Emrah Gökdemir’sWhat Do the Birds Say? documents the life of an individual displaced by yet another war. Fleeing the Syrian civil war, the protagonist settles in southeastern Turkey, where we witness both the struggles of rebuilding a life in exile and the local community’s perception of this “foreign other.”

How much can a person carry when leaving a place behind? Where can the traces of our past be found? What testimonies does a landscape hold? These questions lead us to Armenia, where Zeynep Güzel embarks on a personal journey to uncover her own family history in Come Rain or Shine. As her camera navigates post-Soviet industrial landscapes, it explores the intersection of memory, place, and displacement on an intimate level.

Long before the development of written languages or states and borders, the human voice was a tool for mutual support and the preservation of personal histories. When our nests are destroyed, we fly from place to place, singing our songs in native and borrowed tongues lest our narratives be drowned out by endless streams of information or our identity fade into their background. 

Regardless of our origins, what unites displaced people during this transformative experience is the search for signs of belonging in a new setting. The amount of layers we need to peel off to get closer to that feeling varies. Our bodies and our identities play a role in a script written for unfamiliar systems.

Pure’s musical performance is about searching for roots in unfamiliar places and challenging social climates in an attempt to remain one’s true self. For Zeyo Mann, hip-hop became an essential source of healing from alienation and disconnection.

Our chosen tools for articulating and preserving our identities form a spectrum. The musical programme for the festival Once We Were Trees, Now We Are Birds aims to represent that spectrum, from the echoes of traditional voices to the rhythms and sounds of modern times. Radio Jaguar, Parham Alizadeh, Soheil Soheili and Amado León use their music to empower communities. Sarvenaz Mostofey and Ludmila Pogodina celebrate sisterhood and challenge traditional gender roles in their contributions.

We all sing, not because we have answers, but because we have questions to ask and stories to tell.

Literature can be a powerful tool for bridging gaps and enabling individuals and communities to find roots even in exile, like the mycelial network that sustains growth and connection beneath the earth’s surface.

The literary panel of the programme Birds in the Skies, Mycelium Under the Ground explores how writers and artists continue to cultivate meaning and belonging through their creative practices despite living in exile. The participants will discuss the paradoxes of freedom and belonging in a world of displacement.

Where can we find home again? Is belonging an individual process or is it collective?

The panel will also address the roles of literature and art in the collective experience of exile and how they can serve as a map for navigating the emotional and spiritual terrains of displacement.

Living in exile, especially in Germany, and having to go through all its layered systems just to build a life here is something only migrants face, while locals seem not to even notice it.

In a conversation with Ma Thida and her work about the oppression she faced back in Myanmar as well as the challenges of life in Germany, the panel connects to Aya Sammani’s experiences relating to gender and displacement. Our panel also includes Ali Abdollahi, who will share a different layer of his own journey.

Within the discussion part of the programme From Places to Traces, the representatives of Martin Roth-Initiative, the Goethe-Institut in Exile, host organisations and former MRI fellows will discuss new challenges to the existence of protection programmes like the MRI today and reflect on possible solutions for how to keep their networks alive as a living mycelium of connections.