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An independent media and mutual aid platform for artists, activists, healers, and practitioners working under war, siege, and repression. Built in Berlin. Rooted across geographies.
Who we are and what we build → RootsThree questions run through everything TURBA makes
01
How are you part of cultural resistance?
02
What practices do we need to unearth?
03
What do we need to seed — towards a post-systemic collapse infrastructure for culture?
Featured — SEED 004
Jamila Al-Yousef
Musician, coach, community builder — Berlin
“Cultural resistance isn’t performed. It’s practiced in the rooms we build ourselves.”
Where we come from.
What we are building.
Why it cannot wait.
TURBA (تُرْبَة — soil) is an independent media and mutual aid platform based in Berlin, built for artists, activists, healers, and practitioners working under war, siege, and repression. It centers Palestinian voices — in Gaza and in diaspora — and connects those whose cultural space has been systematically erased: through occupation, defunding, algorithmic suppression, and institutional cancellation.
Two threads run through the platform in conversation across distance: the daily work of holding cultural space under siege, and the collective question of what post-systemic infrastructure for culture might look like when built across geographies. Through a polyphony of exchanges, TURBA addresses how cultural resistance can be sustained in both the diaspora and the homeland, and how new bridges of solidarity can be built through the arts.
Where it comes from
In Berlin, artists and spaces were being silenced for standing with Palestine, Sudan, Congo, and beyond. Funding was pulled. Algorithms removed content. Institutions cancelled without explanation. The question became unavoidable: if the system will not hold space for those who need it most — what do we build instead?
TURBA is that building. Not a brand. Not an institution. A living system, rooted in care, redistribution, and defiance. Before we seed, we dig. Before we grow, we unearth.
The three questions
Everything TURBA produces is organized around three questions. They are not rhetorical. They are the curatorial instrument every practitioner works through, on their own terms, naming what official channels forbid.
How are you part of cultural resistance?
What practices do we need to unearth?
What do we need to seed — towards a post-systemic collapse infrastructure for culture?
How it works — the living system
TURBA has a heartbeat. It is not a static platform. It pulses.
Node events open the three questions to a wider ecosystem — artists, initiatives, spaces, NGOs, and institutions from the diaspora and connected to the homeland. Each event is both a public activation and a site of community building, where the online network becomes embodied and local solidarities are woven into the broader platform.
What each node event produces — raw testimony, mapped challenges, practitioner voices — is gathered in a harvesting room outside surveilling platforms. That material becomes the source from which Seeds, Threads, and the Roots podcast emerge.
The Map and the newsletter are updated monthly alongside each other. What the node events and community calls produce feeds the map, making visible what is moving through the network and what remains stuck.
The hope is that what each node event produces gets documented, published, and fed into the next activation. Whether one local context can meaningfully resource another — that is what the coming activations will test.
Operating model
Two movements, one soil
Above the soil, TURBA reclaims narrative space through media, memory, and amplification. Below the soil, TURBA moves resources toward the people and spaces keeping cultural resistance alive.
Above the soil
Reclaiming narrative space
Documentation, amplification, breaking the shadowban, and preserving voices before they are erased.
TURBA — Soil of Cultural Resistance
Where narrative work and material support meet.
Below the soil
Reclaiming physical space
Resources moving, spaces sustained, and solidarity made structural rather than occasional.
What we do
TURBA documents cultural resistance through filmed Seeds, written Threads, podcast conversations, and an archive held outside extractive platforms.
It connects practitioners across geographies through node events, community calls, and a living map of urgent needs, erased spaces, and emerging infrastructures.
It moves resources back into the soil through Seeds, Patreon, mutual aid, and direct support for people and spaces keeping cultural resistance alive.
Where resources flow
Every Seed carried, every contribution on Patreon flows in three directions:
Direct aid
To communities under siege in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, and Congo.
Space support
To spaces of cultural resistance that need resources to survive.
Knowledge exchange
Sustaining artists, activists, and practitioners in the diaspora.
This is redistribution. Not charity. Not sponsorship. Resources moving back to where they are needed most.
No centre. No algorithm deciding what is seen. No institution gatekeeping who connects with whom. Just roots, finding each other underground, feeding the soil.
Reclaiming space for truth and justice.
Three formats. One question. Cultural resistance documented and kept alive.
This is where the work surfaces. Everything TURBA produces flows from one source: the three questions that practitioners work through on their own terms, in conversation across geographies and conditions.
Seeds
A long-form filmed portrait. One practitioner, invited to work through the three questions as a curatorial instrument — naming what official channels forbid. Each Seed is then threaded into dialogue with another practitioner’s context, creating a conversation across distance. One practitioner at a time. Rooted in practice. Preserved in the archive.
Threads
Specific knowledge carried from one context into dialogue with another. Written exchanges across distance — between Gaza and Berlin, between diaspora and homeland. Because what is being learned under siege belongs in conversation with what is being built in exile.
Roots Podcast
Artists, activists, and journalists brought together to examine what infrastructure cultural resistance actually needs — from underneath. Multiple voices, one theme, spinning a web of resistance.
Watch
Videos from TURBA Soil
All current public videos and Shorts from @Turba_Soil, gathered here for the archive.
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Seeding Resistance Through Space & Solidarity | Community Call | SEED 004
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How Do We Reclaim Space? | Jamila Al-Yousef | SEED 004
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Cultural Resistance Lives in the Everyday | Jamila Al-Yousef | SEED 004
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Reclaiming Space Through Music & Mutual Aid | Jamila Al-Yousef | SEED 004
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What do we need to seed? #culturalresistance
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What do we need to unearth? #culturalresistance
YouTube Short
How are you part of cultural resistance? #culturalresistance
Video
Building Community in Berlin: Art, Activism & Storytelling | Nicky Böhm | SEED 003
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What do we need to seed?
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What Do We Need to Unearth? From Berlin to Sudan #culturalresistance
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Connecting Struggles Across Borders — Berlin, Brussels, Sudan #culturalresistance
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What do we need to seed? #culturalresistance #ramallah #palestine #music
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Music as cultural resistance in Palestine
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Cultural Resistance — Interconnected Struggles Need All of Us | Seed 002
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Seed 001: Palestine Music Space | Cultural Resistance in Ramallah
Coming soon
Threads and podcasts are being prepared.
Read and listen entries will appear here as they are released. Until then, follow TURBA on YouTube and Substack to stay close.
The Web of Solidarity
A living geographic archive.
- Urgent now
- Being built
- Archive
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Updated monthly with the newsletter. Fed by node events, community calls, and field testimonies.
Nodes in the network
This is not a shop.
It is an act of redistribution.
Each Seed you carry is a direct act of solidarity.
Every few weeks we release a new Seed — designed and handmade by diaspora artists, using 100% recycled, sustainable, vegan materials. Each piece is one of a kind. Each carries a story of solidarity with communities under siege. Each one you carry is a direct act of redistribution.
100% of proceeds flow directly to causes chosen by the artist behind each Seed.
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Each Seed carries a suggested contribution. If you are in Berlin and want to tend it in person — reach out directly.
turba@culturalresistance.space
Carry Seeds worth over €100 and we cover the shipping. Use FREESHIP100.
The soil grows stronger with every root that joins it.
TURBA is not built by institutions. It is built by people. Three main ways keep the soil alive.
1
Patreon
TURBA runs on no grants and no sponsors. Monthly contributions on Patreon are what keep the archive alive, the Seeds growing, the map updated, and the network expanding. Everything flows back into the work and the communities it serves.
Become a root on Patreon →
2
Newsletter
Our newsletter goes out monthly alongside the map update — new Seeds, node event dispatches, what moved through the network, what needs attention now. No noise. No algorithm. Just the work, once a month.
Subscribe on Substack →
3
Mutual Aid
TURBA runs a vetted mutual aid network through Telegram — a closed, trusted space for artists, activists, and practitioners who need or can offer direct support: resources, housing, knowledge, care, emergency funds.
Built on trust. Access is vetted. This is not a public forum. After you reach out, a member of the TURBA team will connect with you to verify and welcome you.
Request access →For Seeds, harvesting-room contributions, node events, or city activations, write to turba@culturalresistance.space.