3 Days to Liberation II

But beyond these boundaries, something is shifting. Words are losing their weight, images their clarity. Violence is being explained – politically, religiously, bureaucratically. We live in a time when oppression has once again become justifiable, when wars, expulsions, genocide, and state repression are no longer concealed but justified. A global age of legitimizing violence has begun.

3 Days to Liberation responds to this with a space – a space of lament, of art, of language, that opposes the silence, the forgetting that inscribes itself into discourse. A space where voices from different contexts meet, not to be smoothed over, but to remain audible in their friction.


Here, film, theater, music, and discussion interact as forms of resistance, witnessing, and advocacy. They ask not only what freedom means, but also what it costs when systems legitimize their violence and societies begin to grow accustomed to it.


Liberation here is not a state, but an action: a risk, a transition, a word not yet secured. It happens where people speak, play, sing, and refuse to adopt the language of power.


This space is also a journey—through memories, bodies, and stories. Those who enter it carry fragments of their past: voices, smells, fractures, images that defy categorization. In their movement, a different kind of knowledge emerges, not a closed one, but a breathing, shared one. Knowledge that grows from witnessing, from love, fear, loss, and the refusal to remain silent.

Two years after the first part, 3 Days to Liberation II, taking place from December 12 to 14, 2025, at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, continues this process.

From the experience of 2023, a new form of speaking and coming together emerges: from immediate witnessing to shared responsibility, from the moment of rebellion to the ongoing work of memory.

This year's program follows the paths of artists, filmmakers, activists, and theorists whose work oscillates between art, science, and political experience. The invited works—films, performances, panels, and music—explore the relationship between memory and the body, between resistance and language. In this way, liberation becomes a practice of remembering and action, as an artistic, existential, and collective gesture.

For every narrative carries within it the story of a movement older than the uprising itself, yet one that begins anew with every breath, every sentence, every encounter.

Maryam Palizban is a theater scholar, artist, curator, and actress. Born in Iran in 1981, she lives and works in Berlin. She received her doctorate in 2014 from the Free University of Berlin and the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) with her dissertation, *Performativity of Murder*, which examines martyrdom and Shiite ritual theater practice (2017).

Palizban was a research associate at the ZfL and a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Schloss Wiepersdorf, and at the Center for Islamic Theology at the University of Münster. Her research and artistic practice connect religion, performativity, and embodiment, with a focus on Shia Islam, theatricality, and contemporary cultural expressions. She regularly publishes in German, English, and Farsi on cultural and art theory, philosophy, and religious studies. Her most recent publications include *Leibverständnis und Leibvergessenheit* (Karl Alber Verlag, 2022), which examines human embodiment through interdisciplinary approaches.

As an actress, she is known in Iran for films such as *Deep Breath* (Cannes 2003), *Fat Shaker* (Rotterdam 2013, Tiger Award), and *Lantouri* (Berlinale 2016), and has received numerous awards, including the Iranian Film Academy Award for Best Actress. Her involvement in the Jina Revolution forced her to realize her projects from abroad, and this has since shaped her artistic and curatorial work.

Palizban conceived and curated *3 Days to Liberation*, an interdisciplinary project exploring the spaces between art, science, and activism. She develops formats in which artistic practice, memory and knowledge can be experienced directly, and accompanies collaborative processes that keep history and collective knowledge alive.