In June Dinara has been invited to be a featured reader at the multilingual spoken word night, hosted at Κέντρο Ελέγχου Τηλεοράσεων in Kypseli, Athens.
Dinara read from an ongoing project under a working title Arvanitiko Kefali.
This working title originates from the idiom ‘Arvanitiko Kefali’ - the ‘Arvanite Head’ - a symbol of the stubborn resilience and mental landscape of a people living at the borders of identity. We use this as a departure point to explore the ‘border’ not as a geographical line, but as a psychological marker shaping human character.
Whether in Limnes, a settlement of 400 Arvanite shepherds in the northern Peloponnese, or within a diasporic community of Tatar refugees in post-Soviet space, we encounter a strikingly similar emotional landscape. It is a territory defined by the coexistence of shame and pride, love and harshness, openness and gatekeeping - synonymous emotions that run deep in minorized communities worldwide.
Guided by Édouard Glissant’s concepts of the Right to Opacity and the Archipelagic Thought, we reflect on our own family histories of small communities having to blend into a broader society.
We ask: what remains visible to the public, and what must remain hidden and protected for survival?
Listen to the fragment of a 10-minute performance reading here: