← На главнуюAbout Future In Maz 2026, Gamayun had the honor of taking part in a panel discussion at Stadtkino together with Negin Rezaie and Ruth Katz moderated by Solmaz Khorsand about growing up under authoritarian regimes. Some of the ideas stayed unsaid during the discussion. Some appeared only afterwards, as afterthoughts. We wanted to write them down, partly not to lose them ourselves, and partly because they help explain why Gamayun has been moving in the direction it has in recent years.
Gamayun is a bookstore and community space created in response to censorship, repression, and displacement. For us, discussions about restrictions are not only about censorship laws or visible repression. Restrictive systems shape who can speak, how people can live, and even what kinds of futures they are able to imagine. When people grow up under political pressure, surveillance, instability, or fear, imagination itself becomes disciplined. Certain futures begin to feel unrealistic, dangerous, or inaccessible long before they are officially forbidden. Maybe one of the most powerful effects of restrictive systems is that they colonize the future. One of the ways to resist is to create spaces of imagination through literature, friendships, art, humor, migration, underground networks, and collective care.
The question of visibility is another relevant topic nowadays. Visibility is often presented as empowerment, but the same visibility that creates solidarity and political recognition can also produce surveillance, targeting, and repression. In contemporary attention economies, visibility itself becomes a resource. This raises questions about who controls visibility, who benefits from it, and what it costs to become visible politically. Not all resistance is visible. Many people develop strategies that do not fit dominant expectations of activism: indirect speech, opacity, refusal of fixed identities, or remaining partially illegible. What may appear from the outside as passivity can actually be a conscious strategy of protecting autonomy.
Another important issue is how we receive and interpret political information today. Information increasingly reaches us through fragmented channels: social media, telegram groups, screenshots, encrypted chats, rumors, translated fragments, or independent journalists working under pressure. Under conditions of censorship, war, propaganda, and platform algorithms, there is often no single fully reliable source. Verification becomes collective, unstable, and provisional. This also changes how people read information. Many learn to pay attention not only to statements themselves, but also to contradictions, silences, disappearances, timing, and risk. In this sense, political truth is often not immediate or transparent, but assembled collectively from incomplete fragments.
For us, it is important to resist simplistic binaries between “good democratic societies” and “bad authoritarian societies.” The mechanisms and intensities differ, but all systems of power have limits to the kinds of dissent they tolerate. Protest is often accepted only as long as it remains symbolic and manageable. Once it begins to challenge borders, militarism, economic interests, or systems of control, reactions can become significantly harsher than liberal democracies often like to admit. We can see this, for instance, in Europe through migration policy and the reform of the Common European Asylum System. Procedures become stricter, detention expands, and legal protections weaken, yet these changes remain largely invisible in public discussion. Some forms of violence remain invisible precisely because they are bureaucratic, administrative, and procedural rather than spectacular.
One of the central political and ethical questions today is how to practice solidarity without simplifying each other. How to remain capable of listening across very different realities without turning complex lives into fixed political positions. We do not believe spaces like ours can directly change political systems. But they can keep something alive: memory, language, imagination, and the ability to remain attentive to one another. And that, too, is a form of resistance.
