Author: Franziska Buhre

From October to December 2019 I stayed in Dushanbe/Tajikistan, supported by the Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa). I stuck to my writing practice there and did extensive research.
The texts are written from a personal perspective, not with a journalistic approach. The selection was edited in August 2020.

Cultural memory in Tajikistan is in a very vulnerable state. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the independence in 1992 and the end of the civil war in 1997, there is something like a state doctrine to consolidate a “national identity”. But what exactly this identity should contain, what historical backgrounds and traditions it can refer to, and how it should be carried to the outside world, seems to be completely up in the air and dependent on arbitrary decisions of the respective rulers. What should the many young people who were born in the 1990s onwards learn about their country?

From October to December 2019 I stayed in Dushanbe/Tajikistan, supported by the Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa). I stuck to my writing practice there and did extensive research.
The texts are written from a personal perspective, not with a journalistic approach. The selection was edited in August 2020.

In offices
It would be euphemistic to talk of hardliners when referring to this mixture of stubbornness, open refusal of work, masked as hyperactivity, the reluctance to cooperate and the insistence on endlessly long chains of commands and stiff hierarchies.

From October to December 2019 I stayed in Dushanbe/Tajikistan, supported by the Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa). I stuck to my writing practice there and did extensive research.
The texts are written from a personal perspective, not with a journalistic approach. The selection was edited in August 2020.

I
In order to dig a little deeper into the nexus between political power and industry that unfolds against the backdrop of Tajikistan’s relations with China and with the EU, here’s a chronology of certain events in 2019:

From October to December 2019 I stayed in Dushanbe/Tajikistan, supported by the Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa). I stuck to my writing practice there and did extensive research.
The texts are written from a personal perspective, not with a journalistic approach. The selection was edited in August 2020.

The parks in Dushanbe are brightly lit in the evening, with colorful garlands, steles and LED installations. It would be obvious that all this stuff comes from China, but I don’t know exactly.
Lighting can be a form of surveillance and if the social pressure would not infiltrate emerging relationships already from the start, the lighting does the rest to prevent couples from romantic meetings in the shade.