CORAL

as in Portuguese
Biology: Very small sea animals that secrete a hard and stony substance.
Music: Music sung by two or more voices assigned to each part.

Coral is a project that amplifies the voices of individuals from the diaspora and speakers of non-Eurocentric languages in Berlin, told in their own dialects and creoles. It invites those willing to share their experiences—migrants, refugees, BIPoC, LGBTQIA+, sex workers, people with disabilities, and others—through an intersectional lens.

January 2022, Berlin

I’m living in Wedding for three months, a district that, although quite central in Berlin, feels much more peripheral and, in a very palpable way, reminds me of home, in Porto. A more residential area, my neighborhood, Soldiner Kiez, is mostly inhabited by Turkish families—people who came to Berlin more than 50 years ago, spanning first, second, and third generations. Here, they run their shops, with sign letters and vegetables that feel so fresh to me.
And while I struggle with German words every time I take the Bahn and try to make my way through a museum or cafe in the city, it is in Wedding that I truly come to hear some song of the city. Like a humming, with its rhythm, tones, and repetitions, I’ve become more comfortable in not knowing it. I wonder what is being said, and start making up my own tales. What’s a word I wouldn’t find in my own language? And how do you translate a feeling?
I don’t feel like a migrant, and I certainly don’t want to be a tourist. The time span of three months puts these notions in conflict—how can you feel at home, and yet so lost in words at the same time? I pack my stories back to Portugal in the only way I know: I’ve been working in book design for a decade now, so let it be in words.
There is this humming in my mind, one that has been there for years: letters form words, words form lines, lines form columns, columns form pages, pages form texts… texts form books.

April 2022, Guimarães

Back in Portugal, I visit my hometown, Guimarães, up in the North. I left when I was 18 and come back now and then to visit my mother and my father—here and there, around Christmas or Easter. This time, it was also about a film screening: Alcindo ¹ , a documentary I was asked to introduce at the very same cinema club I used to sneak into as a kid.
This documentary tells the story of a Black boy who went out one night in Lisbon to dance but never made it back home, to the other side of the river, Barreiro. Alcindo was brutally killed by a group of far-right militants on July 10, 1995—Portugal Day.
As I speak about the film, I know I’m about to crack, even though I promised myself: don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it. But then I do—«I come home whenever I want. Alcindo didn’t.»
Is there a word for this?

August 2022, Porto

I wake up to an email with the news that I’ll be going back to Germany. I had grown bored—or maybe a little enraged—with my job, especially with its bureaucracy of words, the static, and the segregation of languages. So I applied for a year-long residency program in Berlin, proposing a project that goes back to words as sounds, focusing on the poetic nature of spoken language—its organic, untranslatable essence.
By this time, I had begun delving into Lettrism works, proposed as a reference for the residency, where I found a reverse formula to my secretarial beliefs about words, and the way I had been composing pages for so long. This idea stems from—and revolves around—the poetry of Isidore Isou, bringing a new humming to my wall: from the poem to the phrase, from the phrase to the word, from the word to the phoneme, from the phoneme to… the sound.

Words aside, was it just me wanting to go back for a walk in Wedding? To get lost in all those voices again?

February 2023, Berlin

The residency begins at Urban Nation Museum, under the theme Linguistic Xpedition. I want to record migrants speaking in their native languages, without any translation, and work on a sound installation with these voices—a device that echoes foreign dialects and invites audiences to experience language boundaries and isolation. Although I’m not sure yet how to make it work, I imagine a path that someone would walk through, guided by voices, clashing with their own physicality.
I suppose the hardest part will be reaching out to people for the recordings, gaining their trust, and making them feel comfortable enough to open up. I, myself, also feel uneasy about these encounters, and I wonder if walking could be a way to make them possible. The ability to leave something behind with each step and let the surroundings lead the way has been working for me for a while now, through all the movements this past year has brought me. And there’s something else about walking—it’s very simple, but at its core, it’s about breathing. Or maybe just breathing a little better. Being outside, sharing something from within, like an oxygenation of words.
All these notions, which first came as instincts, became more powerful after reading Elena Biserna’s introduction for the anthology book Going Out. Feelings I had been struggling with—those conflicts between migrant and tourist—became even more complex in between the ideas of «the cartographer» and «the excursionist». ² It was something I could only fully grasp by reflecting on my own privilege, the way I arrived in this city, and how I move through it. The question of who gets to walk in the city grew stronger in my mind. I desired for these voices to take me where they wanted to walk—as a way to democratize public spaces and challenge negotiations between what is public and what is private. What is bureaucratic, and what is organic. Intertwined: city limits, soundscapes, walking, speech—walking the city as a way to write and be written by public space.
By the end of the month, I launched an open call through the museum’s more institutional channels. At the same time, I began establishing close contact with migrant communities in the city—through local associations, online groups, and sometimes by reaching out directly to someone, a friend of a friend, or a person whose story I had heard and wanted to be part of these testimonies.
The process of finding a subject and recording them while walking through the city was different for each person in the project. With some, it took weeks or even months for them to open up. With others, it happened almost immediately. But something became clearer with every encounter. As Tim Ingold puts it in The Perception of the Environment: «In histories of movement and changing horizons (…) we know as we go, from place to place.» ³

The following represents the walks taken with each person, drawn from memory onto maps using black acrylic paint. A journal-like entry also describes our meetings, the surroundings, and what each person told me. Although no translation was made—and there was no way for me to understand what was said—all the participants later explained their words in the common language we managed to find, our very own lingua franca.

Milda (March 30, 2023, Steglitz)

Milda came from Lithuania in her early twenties to study in Berlin. This was around fifteen years ago. She told me she did a wordplay around the notion of a rainbow, something that could not simply be explained by translation, something that would be hard to understand even in Lithuanian… Something that relates to her own movement: from one place to another, from knowing what she wants and going after it; from freedom to love, and back. As we were facing the Telkowkanal, other migration birds were probably singing about the changing of the seasons, for spring had arrived.

Mina (April 1, 2023, Mitte)

I met Mina, an Iranian woman living in Berlin for a few months, near the Tiergarten. We took a walk in the park not long after we first exchanged emails. I can’t really explain, maybe shyness or the situation itself, which was quite new to me, but we caught ourselves talking about how cruel this project could be: the vulnerability of sharing, talking, and being heard. After a while, Mina stopped near a tree by the Landwehrkanal and gave me the sign that she was ready; and I could start recording. She began by telling me how the stillness of that tree, and the movement of the water, made her think about her migration: a body on a journey, running like a river, while longing for roots.

Elihu (May 30, 2023, Kreuzberg)

Elihu arrived in Berlin a few years ago from Ghana. He was curious about the project, since he also works around language, and how tongues can shape our ways of thinking and expressing. We met first in his studio in Oberschöneweide, but after that we saw each other again at a friend’s place near the Görlitzer Park, where he was staying for a few days. He told me about the things he chooses to share, and not to share, with his family back in Africa. About how hard it is to make a living in Berlin, and the conflicting feelings he faces when it comes to his parents believing that everything is better in Europe, that he now has opportunities and money to build a good life for himself.

Liviu (June 4, 2023, Schöneberg)

I met Liviu through a common friend. He needed a place to crash for a few days and stayed in my apartment. Liviu has been living between Berlin and Turda, in Romania, for nearly a decade. We shared the same space for almost two weeks, but never really got to talk much. I think we were afraid of disturbing each other, so I got to know a little bit about him through the new items I found in the bathroom or in the kitchen. When it was just about time for him to leave, I asked if I could record him and we finally started talking, finding out that we shared so many feelings about our childhoods, about growing up with the notion of not quite fitting in. He took me to David Bowie’s apartment in Hauptstraße in a kind of tribute to the one who had shown him the power of expressing oneself and of reclaiming the pride one should take on being queer.

Madina (July 18, 2023, Prenzlauer Berg)

Madina is one of the people I met through a community app used to share this project. After a few messages, we arranged a meeting at Falkplatz, a green space adjacent to Mauerpark. She is from Tajikistan and came to Berlin five years ago after finishing her studies in Leipzig. She told me about these recent feelings related to a sense of belonging, of building an identity, and how it has become diluted within her experiences in Berlin. Madina spoke to me about how she is finding who she is: through her own reflections on other people, and how this can be deceiving and hurtful. Then she shared a poem around the idea of “gharib”, the tajek word for both migrant and stranger: the one who is lost and keeps on asking questions; not to get directions, but empathy. We walked for hours after this, kind of lost, however grateful for finding each other.

Hanaa (July 28, 2023, Tempelhof-Schöneberg)

Hanaa and I had been in contact for a few weeks before the recording, visiting each other’s workshops. I didn’t know where she would take me for a walk, and just followed the directions to meet at the Tempelhof. I was stunned by the site, a basin connected by wood structures, flooded with the recent rains, and echoing the sounds of frogs. This place, designed in the 1930’s as a rainwater container, is now run by a community of people devoted to maintaining the ecosystem of plants and animals. As we sat watching the drops of rain bring new drawings to the water’s surface, Hanaa talked for a while about coming to Berlin from Egypt fifteen years ago, about her family and her work, and how she objects to the idea of being defined as a migrant. Instead, Hanaa sees herself as a body who tries to be more connected with the surroundings, just like being right there, in that moment, giving and taking from the landscape.

Mohamed (August 4, 2023, Schöneberg)

At first, I struggled with the idea of recording Mohamed’s story, and then actually sharing it in the project. Of all the meetings I had managed to have, this one was the only occasional encounter with whom I had no previous contact, and possibly would never be in touch with again. Mohamed was biking down the street from our residence and asked to join me and other colleagues by the stairs of the building; a place we usually met after work for some cigarettes and beer. Mohamed is a joyful fellow, full of energy, and immediately started telling us his own story: he came from Lebanon, and had been moving around a lot, having already worked in Dubai and other countries across Europe. But he was thrilled to be in Berlin now, where he works as a courier. He talked for hours, and by the end of the evening, it was clear that he did not want to leave. I guess one of the reasons I chose to include this episode was the stairs. They have become an extension of our residency, a place where we hang out and observe the street; an in-between, inside/outside scenario where we experience a lot of random stories from the city.

Theseas (August 8, 2023, Pankow)

My first contact with Theseas was at the Brücke-Museum, where they were giving a guided tour around the work of the Romani-Polish artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. After exchanging a few emails, we decided to meet at this place in Pankow: a fenced proto-forest where all kinds of adaptive plants spring. Like an act of resistance. Theseas told me why this huge open area is in such a state of ‘invisibility’—an endangered species of turtle is known to live there. I instantly felt that a sense of protection can suddenly turn into one of abandonment. As we explored in between bushes, Theseas named flowers and explained their uses. They also talked about this choice of place in Berlin—something that hangs between public and private, as all of this nature in the middle of the city is also a blind spot, and something we need to break in to see. Public and private, intimate but out in the open. Theseas made coffee for us on a camping stove and shared a text by Ursula K. Le Guin on ‘father’ and ‘mother tongues’. Once again I thought about dichotomies, especially these opposite forces that shape the way we talk and, therefore, how we feel and think. I then followed Theseas for a long walk, recording a message to their (now) distant brother, spoken in this broken English, Turkish and ancient Greek — the Cypriot language Theseas grew up with, and that brings them back to their childhood.

Kalil (August 10, 2023, Kreuzberg)

Kalil and I met at the May-Ayim-Ufer, a riverside promenade that owes its name to the Black German poet and activist May Ayim, who fought against racism and colonialism in Germany, and wrote the first study on Afro-German History. We talked for a while about the end of May Ayim’s life, about mental health and suicide, and about how Kalil felt that even her choice in death was political: jumping from the 13th floor, to be seen, to be found, out in the open; publicly. Kalil has been in and out of Berlin for about five years, struggling to make a living as a dancer in a hustle culture that keeps promoting precariousness for minorities such as his own: a Black trans man. Born in France, his parents were originally from Guadeloupe and Réunion, both territories colonized by the same country to which they eventually migrated, leaving their Creole languages ‘in the hidden’ — or, as Kalil shared, to be used at home, in more emotional or tense situations. For his mother, Kalil said that Creole sometimes even meant shame. For Kalil, it means intimacy. Through this mirroring movement, and split by the multitudes of his own identity, Kalil read a poem to me: his words and his voice… Entangled, strong, and bold.

Deniz (August 14, 2023, Neukölln)

Deniz took me to the Comenius-Garten, which is in a not-so-loud area in Neukölln. This labyrinth-like garden felt very protective of itself, kind of unnoticeable, and somewhat like a secret. When we sat by the water, Deniz shared this myth around two Hurrian gods who fought for the Kingship of Heaven on Earth: Kumarbi, who is believed to come from the underworld, and Anu(sh), the divine personification of the sky. Revolting against Anu(sh), Kumarbi eats his genitals and becomes pregnant, giving birth to Teshub through his own penis. Kumarbi, then considered the father of all gods, as well as his offspring, are behind many other mythology and folklore around Mesopotamia, and the birth of many civilizations currently known as the Middle East. Deniz and I also talked for a while about the homoeroticism in these tales, her will to chase these stories, and to connect so many different geographies, from Turkey all the way to Portugal (where her girlfriend comes from). But for now, Deniz is not able to go back to Turkey, from where she came a few years ago to study. A trial awaits her—a prosecution for attending a gay rights demonstration some time ago.

Dana (September 2, 2023, Wedding)

Dana was the first of all the people I met during this project. She was also the last one recorded, ‘unconsciously on purpose’ (I can only guess). That made me think of a circle being closed. We made plans to meet at a cafe around the Soldiner Kiez. This place is on the same street and number where I started thinking about this project more than a year ago. The thing is: I used to live upstairs. But this was no longer on purpose, this was an odd event. That cafe was not even there a year ago. We then took a walk by the Panke and were surprised to see that a music festival was going on all the way down that skinny river that crosses the Wedding district. Dana was born in Israel and moved to the U.S. when she was only three years old. When she got back home, already in her teens, a feeling of misplacement started growing. She told me about how she struggled with the language and its sounds and avoided some words that had started vanishing from her speech. After being dismissed from the military service, Dana moved around for years, from Asia to North America, Europe, and South America. We walked for hours, popping in and out of every gig. We talked about the embarrassment that our own language can bring and how we are also shaped by these tensions and the lack of words. Evening came, and we already knew this recording would have to take place the following day.

October 2023, Berlin

In preparation for the group exhibition where CORAL was shown, one last walk was drawn. Driven by the idea of tracing an ear, I tried to walk around the corner of my studio, between Bülowstraße and Zietenstraße, humming once again: «The eye points outward; the ear draws inward» ⁴ . The words are borrowed from R. Murray Schafer’s seminal work, The Tuning of the World.

My stay in Berlin came to an end soon after. An-other map of the city had already been taking shape in my mind for months—corners, meeting points, subway entrances, hesitant walks to a park, the sound of birds, handshakes, cold and warm beverages. Dots connected through memories, and through other people’s memories that became my own, shaping a city through faces, voices, and their stories.

Bibliography

Biserna, Elena. “Walking and Listening as Relationship.” In Going Out—Walking, Listening, Soundmaking, 21–37. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2022.

Dores, Miguel, director. Alcindo. Portugal: Maus da Fita e SOS Racismo, 2021. Film.

Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1977.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To all the people portrayed in this project, thank you for your generosity. I am deeply moved by our encounters. To my fellow residents, you are family, and I will miss 2023. To Janine, Silke, and Sophia, thank you for your kindness, you made it possible through anxiety. To the museum workers who made my days easier simply by smiling: Hanna, Imed, Eveline, John, thank you. To Francisco, Inês, Oleg, Catarina, Pedro, Manel, Luís, Eduarda, Tina, and Raquel, although miles apart, you are part of this coral. Para a Lara, Marisa e Diana, obrigada, as palavras fogem-me.

SOUND AND MAP Rita Ferreira
AUDIO ENGINEERING Dan Muresan
PROOFREADING Ana Raquel Maia
PRINTING Gallery Print, Berlin

Footnotes

1. Miguel Dores, dir., Alcindo (Portugal: Maus da Fita e SOS Racismo, 2021), Film. ↩
2. Elena Biserna, «Walking and Listening as Relationship» In Going Out—Walking, Listening, Soundmaking (les presses du réel, 2022), 21-37. ↩
3. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 230. ↩
4. R. Murray Schafer, The soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Vermont: Destiny Books, 1977), 11. ↩