from Imad Gebrayel (his own page)
Streaming links: https://linktr.ee/sonnenalleepodcast
Similar to the majority of its inhabitants, Sonnenallee has been othered, vilified, estranged, and heavily researched as an urban space that challenges European notions of city-making, provisioning, and governing. The voices of Sonnenallee are plural. They (re)present a multitude of identities, genders, stories, and histories of solidarity, displacement, and conflict. The ‘Sonnenallee Podcast’ project discusses urban negotiations of space and time in open-ended conversation formats with guest speakers: what affects condition the notion of public space in Sonnenallee? How is public space understood in light of the complex system of identifications in and around the street? And how can such stories creatively challenge the reductivist attitudes facing migrant groups in the public space?
To unravel such (im)possibilities, the podcast hosts a heterogeneous group of participants to discuss their interactions with the street and the different communities living in and around it. The project evokes stories of everyday living, working, remembering, and queering the public space. It is co-hosted by a Hakawati figure (Hakawati means ‘storyteller’ in Arabic), a person who recites traditional stories as a profession in several countries across the Arabic-speaking region. The Hakawati-guest interactions set a familiar cultural atmosphere for the podcast, while my role as a researcher includes production and co-hosting.
‘Sonnenallee Podcast’ is currently published in Arabic targeting Arabic speakers in the city. It is a multimodal project experimenting with different notions of collaboration, intervention, and access as it informs wider research on the street, part of my PhD project at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The project is entitled ‘Shar’e al-‘Arab: Negotiations of Arab-Arab Identifications in Sonnenallee’.
Episode 01: Bassam Dawood (out now)
Episode 02: Hind Taher
Episode 03: Issa Khatib
Episode 04: Sandra Hetz