crossmopollinate

NEW ISSUE THEME & CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS 📢 We are pleased to announce the upcoming issue of Interval Magazine: _The Burial and The Yield._ 🌱 This issue calls for reflections on hope as a radical and political practice—planting amidst ruins, cultivating care in uncertainty, and imagining futures beyond annihilation. To supplement this call, we will also host a bootcamp, a space for ideas to germinate through workshops, collective thinking, and shared exploration. It offers an opportunity to engage more deeply with the theme and with one another. [Details will follow] We invite submissions of essays, poetry, visual work, and experimental forms that sprout, tangle, and yield new imaginaries of what is yet to come. 📅 Deadline for submissions: 15 December 2025 #IntervalMagazine #CallForSubmissions #TheBurialAndTheYield #hope #annahilation #germination #survival #solidarity Design by : @abhijeeta.tejasi

🧳 Our Path: On Mobility, Gaze, and the Banality of Baggage An exhibition unfolding across Heidelberg’s old town and the Völkerkundemuseum. Some things stay with us. A plastic bag tucked into the lining of a suitcase. A pouch of dried herbs from a place we no longer live. A cardboard box of soft things, marked fragile. These are not heirlooms. They are not sacred. And yet, they bear the weight of lives rearranged—moves made, borders crossed, silences endured. This path—part museum, part street, part augmented reflection—asks how objects hold value, and who gets to decide. It lingers on the overlooked carriers of daily life: wedding gifts wrapped in cloth, folders of immigration papers, backpacks filled with more than just clothes. It holds space for all that is ordinary, and heavy. We are gathering such stories. Not as data, not as display—but as quiet insistence. If you’ve held onto something banal and beautiful—because it carried you or because you had to carry it—you’re not alone. You’re invited to share a glimpse of it here: 👉 /forms/d/1qP5LjTSaOekakDhDdfHgyGsSX9NwJW3qaHRgVAD0y6k/edit

🔍 We've built a shared glossary for thinking with and through urban transformation. Now, we’re inviting contributions. If you're working on cities, space, migration, infrastructure, labour, or waste — check out what’s already there and add your own thoughts, definitions, images, or provocations. 📚 It’s a living glossary — shaped by the people who use it. 🫱🏽‍🫲🏾 We’d love for you to be one of them. 💻 Link in bio 📬 DM us to join the server 🌐 https://publish.obsidian.md/crossmopollinate-urbantransformation-glossary/Homepage #urbanresearch #glossaryasmethod #crossmopollinate #collaborativeresearch #researchinpractice #livingglossary

In this gathering, we will learn a basic fermentation technique for you to easily preserve fruits and vegetables you like, just with salt and water. Bring your own vegetable or fruit and a jar. I’ll bring the salt! We will also make mul-kimchi (water kimchi) and some noodles to eat for lunch. In the process, we can talk about what we want to keep, moments of shame through fermented things we like, and memories of fermenting with loved ones that you wish you could have again. The conversations will be compiled for the upcoming issue of our magazine. If you would like to sign up, follow the link in the bio of @crossmopollinate Food is free and we would be very happy to collect some donations 💜 Text: Inah Picture: Vanessa Location: @die_zep Time: 25.04, 11:00 onwards Deutsch / English

Disentangling the Object from the Gaze In Collaboration with artist Sharmila Samant, we bring three installations into Heidelberg’s old town as part of the ECSAS “Paths through the City.” Scan the visiting cards/boarding passes to encounter AR objects linked to stories, poems, and images from researchers and students connected to South Asia. Everyday things sit in museum archives as if they were rare artefacts. This project asks: who decides their value, and why do these objects move more freely than people who they might belong to? 💡 Explore the archive (link in bio), choose an object, and share your memory, sound, poem, or drawing. Add your voice to this growing collaboration. #installation #ecsas2025 #archives #museums #southasia #politicsofmobility #transcultural

In preparation for our upcoming issue, "The Burial and the Yield", we will be having a monthly book club until February. We wish to exchange our thoughts through reading together, as we’re traveling through pages that explore life, death, rivers, longing, survival, and how we think about our future. Our first book will be From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty & Landis Blair and we will proceed to reading: 🌊 To the River by Olivia Laing 🌀 I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman 🌱 Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swaroop 🏝️ What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad We’ll be meeting online at 4PM CET (so you can join from anywhere,) and the link will be shared in our bio soon. Don't hesitate to send a DM for questions in joining! You can also just join in on the books you are interested :)

Identity ferments like kimchi—slowly, unpredictably, but never silently. This essay traces a journey from childhood in Osaka, where kimchi in the fridge felt “abnormal,” to Frankfurt, where a kimchi workshop becomes a return to memory, identity, and pride. Food here is inheritance, resistance, and memory—lingering far beyond the table. Read the full story on our site. Link in bio. #intervalhashtag #longingandbelonging #crossmopollinate #identity #transcultural

Our first episode isn’t a tirade but a call for action: how can feminist approaches to citation reflect the power dynamics that #MeToo exposed in academia? And how can our own citational practices create knowledge rooted in solidarity? In this first episode of our new series Tea and Tirades we explore these questions through two key #Metoo moments in academia  📌 The Raya Sarkar List, which named predatory professors in India which sparking major debates on caste & whose voices are heard. 📌 The Avital Ronell case, where academic prestige & citation networks were used to shield power, while silencing survivors. Through these cases, we reflect on how hierarchies shape which voices are legitimized and how power plays out when a “progressive” person is accused of sexual harassment.

Fermentation takes time. So does finding your place. What began with two forgotten storage bins—filled with flours, grains, and dried vegetables—unfolded into a weekend of kimchi-making, the smell of garlic in a new apartment, and the quiet tension of carrying one’s culture through kitchens and public spaces. This essay lingers on the slow work of preserving—cabbage, memory, belonging. A story of scent, care, and the discomfort of being noticed, too sharply, for the things that feel most like home. Not all smells fade. Some linger. Some are inherited. Some are misunderstood. Read the full story on our website. Link in bio. #longingandbelonging #intervalhashtag #transcultural

*A fading buzzcut. A missed train. Two strangers and the weight of a system.* What seems like an ordinary morning unfolds into something far more telling—a quiet confrontation with systems of exclusion, longing, and belonging. This piece begins at a barbershop and ends on a train platform, but it carries us through the layered terrain of migration, memory, and media. What does it mean to witness someone else’s displacement while en route to fictionalize those very realities? Can fiction carry the truth of estrangement, of inherited silence, of everyday racism? Part diary, part critique, part reckoning—it’s a reflection on how stories find us in transit, and how representation might not just mirror lived experience, but give it weight, dignity, and space to be heard. Read the full piece on the Crossmopollinate website, link in bio.

Does history shape what a space becomes—or do spaces reshape the histories we think we know? This piece unravels the layered past of Palais Weimar in Heidelberg—once a home, factory, school, and now the Völkerkunde Museum—to explore how architecture holds memory like a palimpsest, where every reinvention leaves a trace. At the heart of it is _Reflections of the Archive_ , an exhibition co-curated by international students, where forgotten photographs resurface—ambiguous, intimate, sometimes uncomfortable. Through these fractured images, the piece unpacks how exhibitions don’t just preserve history—they rewrite it, revealing how power, race, and longing echo in what’s displayed, and what’s withheld. Part personal essay, part curatorial critique, this reflection invites us to rethink the neutral facade of museums asking: What does it mean to curate not just objects, but the ghosts they carry? How do archives shape power—and what shifts when those archives are reimagined by those once excluded? Read the full piece. Link in bio.

What if your fondest memories were never real—but stitched together by an algorithm trained on your nostalgia? This piece journeys through the digital architecture of longing, exploring how social media doesn't just show us the past—it builds it. Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, it uncovers how filters, flashbacks, and retro trends create seductive illusions of “simpler times.” But behind every Polaroid tint and pixelated mixtape is a machine persuading us to ache for a past we never truly lived. Read the full piece now on the Crossmopollinate website to question how memory, identity, and loneliness are being reprogrammed—one curated flashback at a time. Link in bio. #Crossmopollinate #memory #ai #magazine #SelfPublishing #longingandbelonging #intervalhashtag #transcultural