In her new book Nation of Strangers, currently shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, Ece Temelkuran sets out on a moving search for meaning: What does home mean in a world where belonging is becoming fragile? Shaped by her own experiences of exile and inspired by encounters along the way, Temelkuran writes with tenderness and poetry, yet also with remarkable precision, about loss, estrangement, and the question of what connects us.
At Neuköllner Oper, Temelkuran’s text becomes the basis for a multi-voiced evening: Actress Agnes Mann reads from the book, while the musicians and performers Mara Snip, Melentini, and Nesrine Belmokh respond with their own texts, songs, and compositions. Afterwards, the artists will join Ece Temelkuran in conversation about their approaches to the themes explored during the evening, inviting the audience to reflect further on the questions raised. An evening weaving together reading, concert, and discussion – and an invitation to renegotiate the meaning of home.
Biographies
Ece Temelkuran
Ece Temelkuran was born in Izmir in 1973. She studied law and worked for many years as a journalist. Due to her critical stance toward the Erdoğan regime and her reporting on Kurdistan, she lost her job and was forced to leave Turkey in 2016. She is the author of several novels and non-fiction books. Her work has received numerous awards, including the International PEN Piece Award, the Edinburgh International Book Festival Award, the Ambassador of New Europe Award, and the El Mundo Journalism Award (Spain’s most prestigious journalism prize). She has given TED Talks and published in international media outlets such as The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The New York Times, and Le Monde. Ece Temelkuran was a fellow at The New Institute in Hamburg and a fellow of the Robert Bosch Stiftung in 2023/24. She lives in Berlin.
Nesrine Belmokh
Nesrine is a singer, cellist, and songwriter whose music bridges cultures, languages, and musical traditions. Classically trained and having performed with renowned orchestras under conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, she has built an international career spanning Europe and North America.
Drawing on influences from jazz, pop, classical music, and North African traditions, Nesrine creates a distinctive sound that moves seamlessly between Arabic, French, and English. After gaining recognition with the trio NES and the acclaimed album Ahlam, she established herself as a solo artist with Nesrine and Kan Ya Makan, a deeply personal work exploring themes of love, resilience, and human connection.
She has collaborated with internationally renowned musicians and performed in Amaluna by Cirque du Soleil. Inspired by figures such as Khalil Gibran, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Oum Kalthoum, she places the cello at the center of her work, continually reinventing its role and expanding its expressive possibilities.
Agnes mann
Agnes Mann was born in East Berlin and trained at the prestigious Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her early theater engagements took her to Cologne, Kassel, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Dresden, Lübeck, and Göttingen.
Today, she lives in Berlin as a freelance actress and has appeared at venues including HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Renaissance Theater, and Deutsches Theater Berlin. In addition to her stage work, she is active as a singer, voice artist, and film actress.
Melentini
Melentini is a singer-songwriter, pianist, trumpeter, and film composer born in Athens and currently based in Berlin. For nearly two decades, she has worked across multiple musical styles and has become a key figure in Greece’s alternative pop scene.
She began her career with the electronic collective Sequence Theory Project and later founded her own ensemble, The Running Blue Orchestra, in 2013, performing internationally at festivals and venues. She has also gained recognition for her film scores, including a nomination at the Mediterranean Film Festival for her soundtrack for the film DOG.
Her music blends melancholic pop, ambient, avant-garde, and synthwave elements with influences from Greek and Balkan folk traditions. Her upcoming fourth solo album, Everything We’ve Lost, reflects on themes of migration, displacement, loss, and the fragility of human relationships, shaped by both personal experience and contemporary humanitarian crises.
Mara Snip
Mara (she/they, 1991) is theatre performer, actress and writer in The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. In 2013 she graduated at the Codarts conservatory in Rotterdam with a bachelor of music in music theatre and is since 2020 based in Berlin.
Her work is described as drama-electronic, documental music theatre. She writes from her personal trans-experience and shares this through creating musical landscapes in which she uses her voice, loopstation and synthesizer. In contrary to hostile public spaces towards trans people, the theatre allows Mara to invite the audience to exist on her terms and queer vision. Her hope is for the audience to live that queer future back in daily life.
Mara considers her transition the ultimate form of self-expression and lets it be her compass for a connected, creative and authentic life. Every day is a renewed, deepened relationship with her developing body and invites fresh and compassionate ways of existing. Transitioning brought her an extraordinary force of autonomy and drives her to reclaim space for the visibility and rights of queerness within our suppressed, dysfunctional society.
In the past years she created two solo-performances, collaborates with Boogaerdt & Van der Schoot, starred in Gloriette by Leila Hekmat at HAU, and co-directed and performed 1000 AIRPLANES ON THE ROOF from Philip Glass at the Neuköllner Oper.
LANGUAGE English and German, with German and English surtitles
Funded by the Robert Bosch Academy of the Robert Bosch Stiftung
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