There are moments when history feels unusually close, when images, voices, and gestures refuse to drift into distance. Three Days to Liberation II, curated by theatre scholar and artist Maryam Palizban and developed in collaboration with Dorky Park under the direction of Constanza Macras, positions itself within this heightened attentiveness. Across its three days, the festival draws together films, performances, conversations, and music that explore how experiences of violence, political repression, and memory become perceptible across bodies and artistic forms. Rather than offering definitive interpretations, the program observes contemporary conditions in which public and private life are shaped by restriction, instability, and shifting forms of visibility. It raises questions that feel both intimate and widely resonant. How is dignity sustained when visibility becomes uncertain. How do people preserve voice and agency under pressure. And what does it mean to inhabit a category such as woman when its social or legal coherence can no longer be assumed. Many of the participating artists work within diasporic or transitional contexts where biography and collective experience are inseparable. Their contributions suggest that the body functions as both witness and archive, carrying forms of knowledge that endure even when official narratives attempt to contain or reorder them.

Before the festival opened, we spoke with Maryam Palizban about these intersecting themes, including exile as a transformative condition and the role of artistic practice in sustaining forms of presence that resist disappearance.

You’ve worked for years at the intersection of performance, theory and political activism. How does 3 Days to Liberation II build on your own artistic and intellectual journey?

Maryam Palizban: 3 Days to Liberation is the logical culmination of my work to date. My entire practice—whether in performance, theory, or political activism—revolves around the intersection of body, power and resistance. This festival allows me to bring these three pillars together. It is not a simple curatorial job, but a practical application of my theory. We investigate how art not only provides political commentary but can itself be a vehicle for liberation. The festival builds on the realization that the stage is a political space and deepens this idea by bringing together artists who live this practice.

Your personal experience of exile often informs your work. How did this vantage point inform the way you approached your role in the festival?

Maryam Palizban: My experience of exile has fundamentally shaped my perspective. Exile is not merely a state of absence, but also a state of constant transformation and survival. This viewpoint led me, in my role, to conceive of the festival not just as a presentation of art, but as a place of encounter and mutual empowerment—a temporary “diasporic home.” My goal was to make voices visible that are often marginalized and to represent the complexity of the “in-between”—the diaspora. This position of being between worlds allows for a unique critical distance that was essential for the selection of the program items.

The Iranian protest movement, particularly the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising, remains a central reference in your thinking. How is this spirit reflected in the program?

Maryam Palizban: The ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement is not just a reference; it is the artistic and ethical compass of this festival. The program reflects this spirit through its fundamental interdisciplinarity. The movement itself has taught us that liberation must be inclusive, intersectional, and profoundly bodily. We see this in the emphasis on voices that question patriarchal and authoritarian structures, and in the celebration of the subversive power of presence—be it in movement, film, or discourse. The invited works track the transition from immediate witnessing to the ongoing labor of memory. The festival merges theory, performance, film, and activism into a holistic strategy of resistance.

You often speak about the body as a site of resistance. How does the festival address or embody the politics of the body on stage?

Maryam Palizban: I see the body as the primary battlefield and simultaneously the ultimate archive of survival. This is a global reality: states and power structures everywhere attempt to control the body—whether through censorship, displacement, or the extreme violence of execution and genocide. In the festival, we try to address this politics of the body as an act of reclamation and presence. We show that the body is not just a victim of these systems but a site of refusal. By bringing these bodies into the light—in film, on panels, or in performance—we try to resist the bureaucratic and political attempts to erase them, making their physical truth undeniable against the mechanisms of power.

How do you see artistic expression shaping and sustaining movements of resistance?

Maryam Palizban: Artistic expression is an existential necessity for resistance, not a mere ornament. Its power begins by functioning as a counter-archive, preserving the stories, faces, and affective truth of the struggle against authoritarian erasure and thereby actively constituting a memory of resistance. Furthermore, art bypasses the rational strictures of political language, entering the realm of shared feeling to enable the construction of a collective resonance and a shared presence required to resist the normalization of violence. Crucially, the artistic act projects the lexical and aesthetic force of transformational imagination, providing the creative language necessary to translate the collective gesture of liberation into reality.

What do you hope audiences, especially those who may not be familiar with Iranian or diasporic contexts, take away from these three days?

Maryam Palizban: I hope the audience experiences these three days as a collective, temporary gesture—as a three-day performance. We have brought together voices, practices, and stories that have connected across time and space to collectively think, speak, feel and dream about liberation. It is crucial that the audience recognizes that what is negotiated here is not a purely local concern but a transnational endeavor. We hope they leave with the understanding that liberation is an action that restarts in every breath, in every encounter, and that this breathing knowledge—which we share—takes us all into the responsibility of using our own imagination as a tool of resistance.

Three Days to Liberation II unfolds less as a conventional festival than as a temporary architecture of attention, one that brings bodies, stories, and artistic strategies into proximity without collapsing their differences. Throughout the program, specific works define the contours of this shared space. The screening of Women Who Said No by filmmaker and journalist Sepehr Atefi revisits the story of ten Baha’i women executed in 1983 and links their refusal to a broader, ongoing archive of memory. Atefi joins a post-screening conversation that extends the film’s questions into the present tense. Testimony by Mila Mossafer appears as another focal point, presented not as a closed narrative but as a fragile, embodied exchange that resists simplification. Additional performances and discursive sessions developed with Constanza Macras and Dorky Park broaden the frame, creating a space where complex experiences can be articulated without being reduced to statements.

Across these three days, the festival quietly underscores the importance of looking closely, listening carefully, and offering a stage at all. For a brief moment, these voices and gestures gather and become perceptible before dispersing again into the more expansive, unfinished terrain from which they emerge.

Three Days to Liberation vol. II
Curated by Maryam Palizban
In collaboration with Dorky Park under the direction of Constanza Macras
12 to 14 December 2025
Volksbühne Berlin
Rosa Luxemburg Platz 10178 Berlin