“Love is a Verb #2—We, the Heartbroken” festival

A festival with ABA NAIA, Ali Chahrour, Alvin Collantes, Alice Hasters, Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, Antonia Baehr, Ariel Efraim Ashbel, Azadeh Ganjeh, Bani Abidi, Candice Breitz, Cassie Augusta Jørgensen, D-Dur Dykes*, Ece Temelkuran, Faravaz, FEELINGS, Hana Yoo, İz Öztat, Jolie Ngemi, Kubra Khademi, Kysy Fischer, Liina Magnea & Finn Ronsdorf, Marina Naprushkina, Occupy Houseclub!, Olympia Bukkakis, parallelgesellschaft, Rebel-Ist-hah!, Rébecca Chaillon & Sandra Calderan, Season Butler, Şeyda Kurt, SEYYARE Anatolian Women’s Choir, Simin Jawabreh, SOAP&SKIN, Thelma Buabeng, Vlatka Horvat a.o.

“Your pain becomes my pain becomes our pain.” —Gargi Bhattacharyya

In a world marked by war, loss and upheaval, how can we dream together of a better tomorrow, resist and take action? “Love is a Verb #2—We, the Heartbroken” takes its title from the eponymous essay by cultural theorist Gargi Bhattacharyya. In her text, she describes heartbreak not only as a consequence of personal loss, but as an awareness of what has been broken in the world and how alliances of solidarity have shifted due to dogmatism and cynicism.

Anyone who truly perceives the violence, inequality and losses of our present cannot remain unmoved by them. Heartbreak becomes an expression of a world that is wounded—and, at the same time, a starting point for solidarity. For it is precisely in the shared experience of vulnerability that the possibility of connecting with one another arises.

The festival brings together performance, dance, music, discussions and panel talks, uniting artists and thinkers who engage with the fractures of our present. Their works deal with memory and resistance, migration and exile, unrequited love and political disillusionment. They explore how people maintain their capacity for action under conditions of war, loss and social upheaval—and what forms of community can emerge in an increasingly fragmented world.

Gargi Bhattacharyya’s ideas are interwoven in the festival with Ece Temelkuran’s reflections on authoritarianism, exile and belonging. The writer and political thinker explores what it means when people increasingly experience themselves as strangers and “unhomed” in the places and communities that were once their homes. Belonging, in this context, is not something predetermined, but rather something we create together. These ideas form the starting point for the “Vessel of Love” (HAU1), which—as in the first edition of “Love is a Verb”—forms the heart of the festival: a space where thoughts, stories, voices and bodies can come together. Inspired by the author Ursula K. Le Guin and her “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”—which focuses on narratives gathered together as if in a carrier bag and thus offers an alternative to historically male-dominated heroic tales—HAU1 becomes a vessel. At its centre is a large-scale work by the visual artist Kubra Khademi, painted on fabric especially for the “Vessel”.