3 Days to Liberation II
12–14 December 2025
Concept and curator : Maryam Palizban
Presented by CONSTANZA MACRAS | DORKY PARK
Between oppression and survival
In the first eight months of 2025, at least 864 people have been executed in Iran. That is twice as many as during the same period in 2024. Execution as an instrument of political control, as a ritual of intimidation – the state is killing people to make us forget.
Over and beyond these boundaries, other significant shifts are taking place: Words are losing weight, images are losing clarity, violence is made to seem reasonable – on political, religious and administrative levels. We live in a time when oppression becomes justifiable, and war, displacement, state repression, and genocide are no longer denied or concealed. The legitimateness of violence is looming large throughout the globe.
The festival 3 Days to Liberation offers a space for art, language, and for grievance and mourning, to act against the silence and the neglect that is inscribed into our discourse; a space of encounter for voices from the most diverse backgrounds, in which the tensions and frictions are made visible and audible. A space where film, theatre, music, and debate find together as forms of resistance, testimony, and advocacy, in which we ask what freedom means, and what price we have to pay when political systems set out to legitimate tyranny, and societies put up with that.
Liberation is not a static condition, it is action and process – a risky endeavour, a transition, a word whose meaning has to be negotiated. Liberation only happens when people can speak out, play and sing, and when they refuse to adopt the language of power.
This space is a journey through memories, stories and bodies. Anyone stepping inside carries fragments of their past: voices, smells, fractures, images that seem impossible to place. When they interact, a different kind of knowledge will emerge – no fixed knowledge, rather a living and breathing, shared kind of wisdom. A form of knowledge that grows out of testimony, out of love, fear, loss, and out of the refusal to be muted and remain silent.
In a follow-up to the first part two years ago, 3 Days to Liberation II will be continuing this process at Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz between 12-14 December 2025.
The experience of the 2023 event gave rise to new forms and formats of coming together and talk, and initiated a shift from individual testimony to shared responsibility, from moments of rebellion to long-term processes and an ongoing work on collective memory and remembrance.
This year’s program follows the paths of artists, filmmakers, activists and theorists whose work oscillates between art, academic research and political activism. In films, performances, concerts and on panels, they will sound out the relationship between memory and body, between resistance and language. This is liberation transformed into a practice of remembrance and action, into an artistic, existential, and collective gesture. Every story carries the history of a movement within, a movement that outlasts the revolt, revitalized with every breath, every utterance, every encounter.
Original texts by Maryam Palizban; translated by Bettina Seifried
Maryam Palizban is a theatre studies scholar, artist, curator and actor. Born in 1981 in Iran, she lives and works in Berlin. In 2014 she earned her doctorate from Freie Universität Berlin / Centre for literary and cultural research (ZfL) with a thesis on The Performativity of Murder, a study on martyrdom and Shiite ritual theatre practice (published 2017 by Kadmos Verlag in German). Palizban was research associate with ZfL and held scholarships awarded by Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Schloss Wiepersdorf and Centre for Islamic Theology at Münster University. Her research combines religion, performativity, embodied and artistic practice, with a focus on Shi’a Islam, theatricality, and modern cultural forms of expression. She regularly publishes in German, English, and Farsi on cultural theory, philosophy, and religious topics.
As an actor, she has gained prominence in Iran through films such as Deep Breath (Cannes 2003), Fat Shaker (Rotterdam 2013, Tiger Award), and Lantouri (Berlinale 2016), and was awarded the Iranian Film Academy Award for Best Actress. Her involvement in the Jina Revolution led her to pursue her projects abroad, which has since shaped her artistic and curatorial work.
Palizban conceived and curated 3 Days to Liberation as an interdisciplinary project to explore new spaces between art, science, and activism. She develops fresh formats in which artistic practice, memory, and knowledge can be experienced in tangible ways, and attends to collaborative processes that keep collective and historical knowledge alive.
CONSTANZA MACRAS / DORKY PARK
Artistic director and managerial head: Constanza Macras
Company manager: Paulina Borda
Production manager: Alisa Aleshchenko
Production: Vicky Kouvaraki
Production assistant: Volha Vishniova
Technical director: Milos Vujkovic
