Where Words Stay When Home Fades: Lesung mit Atefe Asadi & Sarah Rauchfuß auf Farsi und Deutsch

In the organizer's words:

When home disappears, language is often the last thing that remains - and at the same time the first thing that threatens to break apart in exile. Bärenzwinger Berlin invites you to a reading with Iranian author Atefe Asadi and translator Sarah Rauchfuß on July 24 at 7 pm. The reading provides an insight into literary fragments from a life in between: between inner rebellion and outer silence, between remembering in the mother tongue and expressing oneself in a foreign language.

Asadi's texts arise from experiences of repression, migration and alienation. They do not tell "of Iran", but of an everyday life that has been torn apart by political violence. These stories, written in Farsi, contain voices that have been silenced in places of control. In the reading, they encounter a new language - Rauchfuß' German translation - which is not a mere image, but a tentative resonance chamber.

The evening is part of the exhibition This, too, is a way of keeping each other close, which deals with queer, feminist and anti-colonial perspectives on memory, care and the narration of loss. It focuses on stories made invisible, fragmented narratives and forms of mourning that create closeness through shared vulnerability.

Born in Tehran in 1994, Atefe Asadi worked as an author, editor and translator in the Iranian literary scene before her books were banned and she was imprisoned for her work. She has been living in exile in Germany since 2022, where she continues to campaign for literature and freedom of expression. Her texts have been translated into several languages and appear in projects such as Weiter Schreiben.

Sarah Rauchfuß (born 1990 in Ottersberg near Bremen) has been translating contemporary Persian literature from Afghanistan and Iran since 2019. She works as a freelance translator for the Weiter Schreiben project, the DAAD and various literary institutions and festivals in German-speaking countries. Her second novel translation, Bahram Moradi's "Das Gewicht der anderen" (Wallstein Verlag), will be published in August 2025.