7.10.2019
7 pm

OMAR KASMANI
Thin Attachments: Writing Berlin in Scenes of Daily Loves

with: Omar Kasmani e Anna Fedele

Location: Lungomare

In collaboration with EVAA, Association of South Tyrol anthropologists

THIN ATTACHMENTS: READING BERLIN

This writing project brings personal memoir to bear on an affectivegeography of Berlin. It is a constellation of non-linear fragments, written in the third-person masculine form. Across Scenes of Daily Loves, the city’s queers and Sufis, saints and strangers, lovers and research-partners cross paths at work, in cafes, at mosques, online, and in bed. Queer, migrant, and the religious are figures that appear and reappear in this geography through daily routines and habits, private rituals of be/longing and scenes of public intimacy. The narration of the intimate and the private becomes a way to think of an urban full of ghosts, dreams, memories, imaginations and anxieties – a city so porous that its boundaries can never be sharply drawn.

Omar Kasmani – born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan – is a cultural anthropologist and ex-architect homed in Berlin. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Affective Societies, a collaborative research centre at Freie Universität, Berlin. His work pursues ideas of post-migrant be/longing, queer futurities and public intimacy – a research practice that is best read across the study of religion, queer worldings and affect theory. He has co-edited the book Muslim Matter (Revolver Publishing 2016) and is currently working on his first monograph on saintly intimacy and unstraight futures set in a pilgrimage town in Pakistan.

Anna Fedele – is an anthropologist and sociologist from Bolzano whose research focuses on the intersections of gender, religion and corporeality. She is currently a Senior Researcher at the Lisbon University Institute in Portugal. Her monograph “Looking for Mary Magdalene” (Oxford University Press, 2013) has received the Award for Excellence of the American Academy of Religion. Anna is a member of the board of EVAA and more recently her research has focused on pilgrimages in the Alps. She is the co-editor of the Routledge book series “Gendering the Study of Religion in the Social Sciences”.