With this autobiographical book the author, Rosanna Sirignano, tells her experience as an Italian Muslim who, in compliance with her own interpretation of tradition, wears the veil and adjusts her clothing to her belief, openly demonstrating her allegiance to Islam.

Over ten years, to each of which a chapter of the volume is dedicated, Sirignano writes about the evolution of the relationship with her spirituality, with the body, with the reality around her. The personal events become a starting point for reflections that embrace multiple topics, which make the volume perfectly real and current: from growing up in a religious community, to living life as an ›emigrant‹ to Germany , to homosexuality.

Rosanna’s story is also intertwined with the stories of the other Muslims she met during her life path: each of them, in its own way, becomes a piece in the construction of their perception of themselves, of her identity as a woman – a determined woman in her path first of studies and then professional, modern in every respect – Italian and Muslim. Together, his and other stories, return the fresco of the variegated world of Islam when: from the abstractness of religion, becomes the experience of Italians, Syrians and many other women (but also men!), made up of choices, traditions, contradictions

Rosanna Maryam Sirignano is an educator for personal development through Arabic language, culture and Islamic studies. In 2019 she founded MaryamEd Formazione Transculturale. She is member of the Islamic Cultural Center of Italy, she is active in various interfaith dialogue initiatives nationwide. She wrote and discussed her PhD in Islamic Studies at the University of Heidelberg where she was student assistant for the Start-up professorship in Transcultural Studies. She is involved in several conferences and initiatives on gender justice in Islam. She is the author of several scientific and informative article and of the book My Syria (La mia Siria) published by Villaggio Maori Edizioni..

Hannah Klein and the curator Mehveş Ungan read selected parts from the book ‘A decolonial feminism’ (2019). Afterwards the autor Françoise Vergès join to the discussion via zoom.
The reading is in German and discussion in English. “In this powerful manifesto,Françoise Vergès argues that feminists should not be accomplices of capitalism, racism, colonialism, and imperialism: it is time to build a feminism that fights not only sexism but also the system that created bosses, built the prisons and polices women’s bodies.” (Pluto Press, 2021)

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Müller-Commichau will guide through the current exhibition Matter of Alliances by Marwa Arsanios.

Language: German.

Monika Czyżyk is a visual artist based in Helsinki/Finland. Currently, she is a fellow at Akademie Schloß Solitude in Stuttgart. She will give a talk about her recent work. Her virtual reality piece „Mycelium Orgasm Report“ and her video “Organic Techno” (with Neil Luck) will be displayed only for a few hours, special for Bar Blau hours.

Marcel Wälde and the curator Mehveş Ungan will read from the book ›The Climate of History in the Planetary Age‹ by Dipesh Chakrabarty and invite to a joint discussion afterwards.

For the past decade, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has been one of the most influential scholars addressing the meaning of climate change. Climate change, he argues, upends long-standing ideas of history, modernity, and globalization. The burden of ›The Climate of History in a Planetary Age‹ is to grapple with what this means and to confront humanities scholars with ideas they have been reluctant to reconsider—from the changed nature of human agency to a new acceptance of universals.

Chakrabarty argues that we must see ourselves from two perspectives at once: the planetary and the global. This distinction is central to Chakrabarty’s work—the globe is a human-centric construction, while a planetary perspective intentionally decenters the human. Featuring wide-ranging excursions into historical and philosophical literatures, ›The Climate of History in a Planetary Age‹ boldly considers how to frame the human condition in troubled times. As we open ourselves to the implications of the Anthropocene, few writers are as likely as Chakrabarty to shape our understanding of the best way forward.

Language: German.

Monica Juneja is Professor of Global Art History at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies. Before her assignment in Heidelberg, she was Visiting Professor at Emory University, Atlanta, USA. She has been Professor at the University of Delhi, India, and has held visiting professorial positions at the Universities of Vienna and Hannover, in addition to research and teaching assignments at the Universities of Bielefeld, Halle a. d. Saale and Heidelberg. After graduating from the University of Delhi, she did her doctorate at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Monica Juneja has held Fellowships of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, German Academic Exchange Service, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Volkswagen Foundation. Her areas of research span the fields of European and South Asian studies. They include practices of visual representation, the disciplinary trajectories of art history in South Asia, gender and political iconography in modern France, and the interface between Christianisation, religious identities, and cultural practices in early modern South Asia.

Language: German

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Müller-Commichau will guide through the current exhibition Matter of Alliances by Marwa Arsanios.

Language: German.