AL.FESTIVAL.2025: Songs as Sites of Memory | Diana Abbani, Alia Mossallam, Eslam Krar, Leil Zahra Mortada & AL.Berlin

On Friday, October 10th, AL.Berlin hosted a panel talk at Niemetzstraße around the topic Songs as Sites of Memory: Towards an Arab Reckoning with Nubian Dispossession with Diana Abbani, Alia Mossallam, Eslam Krar, Leil Zahra Mortada Songs are archival documents - dynamic carriers of emotion, ideology, and identity. They hold stories of loss and survival, bearing the weight of what has been taken and what still flows through memory. They also embody people’s histories, becoming a way for communities to remember. For the Nubians displaced under Nasser and in exile till this very day, songs became living archives of what was submerged: the villages left behind, the homes abandoned, the languages at risk of erasure, and their ways of life with the Nile. This convergence is bound up with Arab anti-colonial politics, while also raising urgent questions about nationalism and the nation-state, and about identity itself in the so-called Arab world.