Sisu Mon Satrawaha: Som Tam Politics & Have You Eaten?

In the organizer's words:

PAN-GEA Global South-South Festival – Queer Beyond

27–30 July | Theater Ballhaus Prinzenallee, Berlin-Wedding

Free Entry!

29 July — Sisu Mon Satrawaha 

Food Performance | Short Film

Som Tam Politics

Often, discussions focus on the fetishization of Asian women, perpetuating stereotypes of poverty, weakness, and involvement in sex labour. Sisu Satrawaha aims to scrutinise the history and politics of Thai marriage migration to Germany, challenging the colonial gaze on Asian women. Central to her exploration is the iconic Thai dish 'Som Tam' or green papaya salad. Som Tam serves as a gateway to comprehend the experiences and struggles of Thai women amidst the backdrop of marriage migration.

Have You Eaten? 

Imagining Food, Love and Beyond Borders

Documentary 30 mins / color 

The film follows various Thai communities in Berlin, including Thai Park, a Thai temple, and private ho- mes. In parallel, a masked, nameless storyteller recites Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Sze- chuan, echoing themes of the tragic fate often assigned to Oriental women.

Global South-South Festival  - Queer Beyond

Format & Flow:

Each evening features:

> Performative rituals, screenings, sound explorations

> Collective gatherings in the garden for drinks, conversation, and informal exchange



27 – 30 July / Free entry

PAN-GEA Global South-South Festival is a transdisciplinary open-air festival held over four evenings in the backyard of Theater Ballhaus Prinzenallee in Berlin-Wedding. The festival brings together audiovisual, performative, and sonic contributions by diasporic voices from the Global South, including artists, researchers, activists, and those who move across disciplines.It centers decolonial perspectives, plural cosmologies, and embodied reflections on identity, territory, and resistance.

In its 2025 edition, PAN-GEA proposes to (re)think queerness not only as an identity, but as a critical methodology a way of producing knowledge, feeling, and resistance. This proposal emerges from a concrete urgency: to create frameworks that enable and sustain modes of existence, expression, and thought that operate as dissidence practices that resist normativity through other languages such as ritual, embodiment, spirituality, and collective experience.

What ways of thinking and knowing queerness exist in the experiences of the Global South that have been ignored, or misread by colonial epistemologies?

And what kind of space must we create so that these forms are not only seen, but held, without being translated, adapted, or asked to justify themselves?

In this context, queerness is no longer reducible to an identity category or a politics of visibility; it becomes an act of epistemic disobedience that resists assimilation into the frameworks of the Global North. It emerges as a materialized memory, present in Indigenous cosmologies, spiritual traditions, everyday gestures of resistance, and lived experiences shaped by migration, racialization, structural violence, and unruly desire Here, queerness is embraced as a disruptive force, one that unsettles dominant narratives of binary gender, linear time, development, normativity, and social order.

PAN-GEA is not a space for representation or identity consolidation, but a site of resonance, co-presence, and relational listening.

not from north vision but from south self-claim

not from academical knowledge but from local experiences

not from macro solutions but micro exercises

not from ecological activism but from multicultural approaches

not from political frontiers but from personal identities

 

Most activities take place in the garden area of Theater Ballhaus Prinzenallee. lease note that the space is not barrier-free. We recognize these limitations and are committed to creating more accessible spaces in the future.