Suspended between languages, cities, and inherited memories, the work of Sultan Çoban unfolds as an accumulation of identities. Singer, actress, assistant, diva, witch: each performance adds another layer. Across a constellation of media, spanning live art, audiovisual, text, and installations, Sultan Çoban performs a fictional character that bears her own name. The irony of this gesture, almost quixotic, blurs any dichotomy between the real and fiction; becoming a method of inhabiting tensions between her Kurdish heritage, emigration, and hyper-femininity.
In the choreography of being seen, red lipstick, velvet curtains, and gold jewellery exist at the threshold of eroticism and baroque. A making and unmaking of identity in search of a sense of belonging. In Çoban’s performances, irony permeates everything. Camp – intended as a love of melodrama, artifice, and theatricality of gestures – operates as a temporary evasion from the patriarchal gaze we have internalised; the constant fear of being too much, too glamorous, tragically loving.
The fictional figure “Sultan Çoban” protects what autobiography cannot safely reveal, while simultaneously intensifying vulnerabilities. By exaggerating the codes historically used to discipline female visibility, the artist creates ruptures between wanting and being wanted. Between display and agency. Between gender roles and the bodies that exceed them.
If Unveiling for a Play (2024) reveals the theatricality of identity, staging a new character at every appearance, Zêr (2023) [Kurdish for gold] insists that subjectivity is constructed through adornment and repetition. The artist had been wearing a copy of her mother’s jewellery, collected over a lifetime, for two weeks prior to the opening, when she transposed the golden replicas onto a red-velvet display. By elevating the misogynist value that this ritual used to hold in the past into unprecedented meanings, the artist creates a new tradition. Not a patriarchal exchange sanctioned by marriage or death, but a demand to be seen on her own terms.
Zêr is both performance and fabulation, introspective yet public, fleeting yet monumental. Almost as a souvenir crystallises suspension, the objects in the show — a flowery curtain accompanied by handwritten notes and a photograph of her mother wearing the zêr at her age — refuse the catharsis of nostalgia.
Weaving together memories and material stories, the jewellery is neither fetish nor relic: it is a proposition. Like wearing a lover’s garment, celebrating a newly-invented ritual fosters a gesture of world-building, a genealogy of affects.
The copies of golden accessories, chains, and bracelets represent both tradition and phantasmagoria: they script the body into legibility while offering the redemption of autofiction. In the shimmer of red velvet and golden charms, ornamentation becomes a manifesto, an ode to intergenerational legacy, a rewriting of one’s role.Objects as simulacra of affects reappear in And Then I Left With & Without a Trace (Be Xatirê Te) (2025) or Arrival or the Return (2025). A dried rose with crystal chains, a used lipstick, a train ticket, a hotel pen. In the indefiniteness of being left aside or carried along, these objects become vessels of temporary belonging. Identity sediments into irrational prophecies, the kind of feeling when you close your eyes and flip a coin wishing for luck, daydreaming that you will be coming back to a certain place. Both works make tangible the ambivalences of emigration, the perpetual cycle of loss and excitement of navigating your life in your second language. Home cannot be located in a single place: instead, you try to make every place feel like your own.
Just as an immersive scent or a taste can transport you to another time-space, memory reverberates through overflowing sound. Arabesk ballads, Kurdish love songs, evanescent pop melodies wafting from radios, these are not nostalgic citations but technologies of romance. Sentimentality becomes a device through which feelings exceed narrative. Lyrics promise eternal devotion or mourn irreversible loss, yet in Çoban’s performances the emotional climax rises without resolution.
Her reenactments of televised pop shows are interrupted by multilingual anecdotes anchored to these songs. A hit overheard at the gym folds into the music of exhilaration filling New York streets. A ballad played at a Kurdish wedding resurfaces years later in another country. “I hope you’re also dancing at this moment,” she says in one monologue, creating a temporary community through listening. To lip-sync is to navigate contradictions: to reclaim autonomy while participating in a system structured by attention and desire. Echoing José Esteban Muñoz, popular culture then becomes the “stage where we rehearse our identities” (José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 104.). To borrow a voice without relinquishing one’s own.
Moving between Northern Europe and Rome, Çoban recalls a guesthouse once owned by her family in Kurdistan, a place that survives primarily through gossip. There are no photographs or official documents; the house persists as a narrative trope. What does it mean to host and to be hosted when relationships are increasingly commodified? What if seduction is a way of claiming space rather than surrendering to it?
These questions intensified during her residency in Rome at Istituto Svizzero. The glass façade of the studio transformed rehearsal into a semi-public event. From outside, passersby glimpse fragments of movement, shifting curtains, reflections of light. The studio functions as an introspective refuge while staging the politics of the gaze.
When asked how Rome influences her research, Sultan Çoban replies, emphasising the mesmerising feeling of being immersed in its immemorial spectacle, its ruins, the Catholic opulence, its baroque decorations. The passion that permeates everything. Rome is making her want to sing again. Sometimes, she continues, “I take my fictional character out for a walk and we just go and look at the dresses in shop windows together”. While we speak, she mentions the impression that her work resonates deeply in the audience here. I can’t help but think how her hyperfemininity gains even more significance in the context of post-Berlusconian feminism. Her personal diva aesthetic and identity experimentalism reveal the culturally mediated nature of gender performance while reclaiming the right to multiplicity. But most of all, her pride in being a Kurdish woman emerges throughout her practice: the ambition to represent other ideals beyond fighters and mourning, opening unprecedented paths through her life. Perhaps it is precisely in this positioning that the transformative power of Sultan Çoban’s autofiction lies: in weaving together personal and collective deconstruction, Kurdish diaspora and transnational encounters; allowing us to mirror ourselves in others’ resistance. In the rehearsal of excess, in the daring to be too much, in finding her own voice, new ways of living come into being.
Seduction, far from being compliance, becomes a choreography of refusal. At the threshold between not-belonging-anymore and not-belonging-yet, overperforming femininity reveals its underpinning script and unsettles dominant power dynamics. Sultan Çoban often articulates refusal through disappearance. She turns her back to the audience. She exits before the music resolves. Objects gathered across cities remain as simulacra of presences. The radio continues to murmur. Every exit becomes a prelude to return. In leaving traces everywhere while carrying every place with her, belonging emerges through cyclical encounters, perpetually in the making. In the untranslatability of living between languages, freedom is neither a return to an origin nor assimilation into normativity but permanence in transition.

What is the main project you will be working on during your residency?
At Istituto Svizzero, I aim to kick off my habilitation research project titled « The Italian Ticinification: Building, Financing, and Promoting Swiss Proximal Coloniality from Ticino to the Kingdom of Italy (1857-1947). » In brief, with my background in the history of practices, labor, and production studies, I aim to study the impact that some Ticinese actors had on the Italian built environment by reinvesting the capital derived from various extractive capitalist operations. During this first semester of study in Rome, I will focus primarily on a pars pro toto case study: the construction of Villa Maraini, a transnational architecture whose historiography still lacks a labor perspective that I aim to contribute to.

What do you expect from the residency?
I expect to be able to access two sets of materials: on one side, the building as an artifact; on the other, the primary and secondary sources preserved at Istituto’s archive and library and at the Archivio Storico Capitolino. Specifically, I will look at three clusters: the construction of the Villa from the Ludovisi-Boncompagni ownership to the Maraini ownership; the maintenance of its premises throughout the years; and information related to the Maraini family and their real estate portfolio at large, as the family is one of the pivotal actors under study in my overall research project.

How do you think the dialogue between art and science can influence your work?
As an architectural historian, I have always nurtured my practical background as an architect. In 2015, I co-founded the research-based architectural practice OFFICE U67, which has offered me the possibility to use exhibition, set, and graphic designs as means to share the research findings from my academic career. Reaching the general public and breaking the walls of academic and disciplinary boundaries is the real essence of designing spatial installations by occupying a physical space to disseminate academic outcomes. Istituto Svizzero fuels and inspires my approach by offering many occasions for collaborating across art and science, both formally and informally. In my case, I am particularly interested in instances so far neglected by dominant and overlooked curatorial and scientific narratives, such as class, labor, gender, and race.

What influences your work?
My work is influenced by the contemporary conditions in which I am working. As an architect, educator, and researcher, I have worked in transnational settings, contexts, and environments where physical and national boundaries are often crossed, blurred, and overlapped, and the travel component is very pivotal. As such, I am constantly attracted to an ongoing discourse at the global scale, rather than the local one, in the disciplinary contents under study as well as in my methodology.

Who do you admire most in history?
More than who, I think it is the what that I admire most in dealing with the history of architecture. After completing a PhD where a significant component was related to contemporary labor conditions in architecture under neoliberalism and having dealt with qualitative data collection through interviews, I have been highly exposed to how architects implicitly or explicitly promote their projects as commodities, leaving aside the work conditions in which they operate. I have learned to appreciate the silenced actors rather than the loud ones. By prioritizing quantitative data collection, big data analysis, distant reading, and the act of giving voices to actors and instances that have been muted and unheard for too long.

What music are you currently listening to?
I am a very curious person. Looking at my phone, one might find a range from classical music, such as orchestra and ballet, to trap and electronic music. My guilty pleasure, especially when traveling late at night, is to listen to the same radio shows I have been following since high school, broadcasted on Italian Radio Deejay. Somehow, despite a life in transit, listening to the same shows and radio voices allows me to understand current trends in music and decide whether to download a song on the spot, while also making me feel at home.

Do you have any rituals/routine during work?
I am a to-do list person; I always have been. So, I check calendars, notes, and emails often, from when I wake up in bed to when I go to bed. The ritual of marking things as checked off my to-do list always gives me a high sense of satisfaction.

What legacy do you hope your research will leave behind?
I hope to contribute to writing an alternative historiography about the impact of Ticinese actors on the Italian built environment. One that might expand the single-male heroic narrative promoted for too long and its current periodization in architectural history, which has so far been limited to early modernity and a few “masters.” One that aims to problematize and unravel colonial instances, extractivist dynamics, and labor perspectives. One that might unlock how the capital extracted from farming and plantation activities has shaped the built environment in contexts much farther from the extraction sites.

What fascinates you about Rome?
The sunset and the horizon seen from the highest point in the top tower of the Istituto fascinate me the most.

The future for you is…?
Now.

A quale progetto lavorerai durante la residenza?
Il progetto intende investigare la figura professionale di alcune architette socialiste e comuniste, e parallelamente o contestualmente femministe, che hanno operato a Roma tra gli anni ’60 e ‘80 e analizzare l’impatto delle loro convinzioni politiche sulla loro pratica architettonica e sul proprio pensiero teorico. L’intento è di andare oltre la presentazione di resoconti biografici, inquadrando l’attività di queste architette nel contesto politico e architettonico dell’epoca e mettendo in luce le loro reti professionali nel più vasto ambito dell’industria delle costruzioni. Le carriere professionali delle architette identificate nel progetto vengono discusse sulla base dell’analisi di materiale primario e secondario raccolto tramite una varietà di metodi di ricerca qualitativi, tra cui l’analisi di materiale d’archivio e interviste ad alcune protagoniste dell’architettura di quel periodo.

Quali sono le tue aspettative per questa residenza?
La possibilità di avere il tempo e il supporto necessari per portare avanti il mio progetto. Inoltre, il mio percorso di formazione, tra architettura, sociologia e studi di genere, è caratterizzato da una forte interdisciplinarità, per cui avere la possibilità di discutere i temi di mio interesse con altre persone provenienti da vari ambiti disciplinari è un elemento essenziale per lo sviluppo del mio progetto. Il fatto di vivere a stretto contatto con i fellows, caratterizzati da background e formazione in discipline molto varie, si sta rivelando una preziosa fonte di idee e riflessioni.
E poi mi aspetto di passare molte ore a leggere in giardino.

Come pensi che il dialogo tra arte e scienza possa influenzare il tuo lavoro?
Il mio lavoro è molto legato allo studio di movimenti storici di attivismo dal basso che hanno sempre avuto la necessità di utilizzare forme DIY di espressione e azione. La mia ricerca entra continuamente in relazione con metodi performativi ed espressivi come la musica popolare, la fotografia, la produzione di ciclostilati e volantini. È utile comprendere come le tecniche e le pratiche artistiche siano state utilizzate in passato e come possano essere adattate alle azioni di attivismo contemporanee.

Cosa influenza il tuo lavoro?
I temi della giustizia sociale, della solidarietà e dell’azione collettiva ricoprono un aspetto fondamentale della mia vita, diventando un elemento fondante anche del mio lavoro.

Chi ammiri di più nella storia?
La mia pratica politica si basa molto sull’aspetto comunitario della vita sociale, motivo per cui sono molto scettica nei confronti della celebrazione individuale. Tuttavia, sono affascinata da alcuni momenti storici localmente diffusi e non legati a date precise, come l’occupazione universitaria alla fine degli anni ‘60, le lotte partigiane o il contesto che ha caratterizzato i circoli femministi degli anni ‘70.

Che musica stai ascoltando attualmente?
Sono una di quelle persone noiose e abitudinarie che continuano ad ascoltare per il 90% del tempo la stessa musica che ascoltano da sempre. Nonostante ciò, sono molto entusiasta del 10% che, grazie al passaparola di amici fidati o all’algoritmo di Spotify, introduco costantemente ma lentamente nel cuore delle mie playlist. Sono convinta che sia una conseguenza inevitabile del fatto di essere stata adolescente durante il periodo dei lettori mp3 che contenevano solo una manciata di album.

Hai qualche rituale/routine durante il lavoro?
Per il tipo di ricerca che conduco ho la necessità di consultare archivi e incontrare persone con cui parlare e confrontarmi, e questo non mi permette di avere una routine quotidiana fissa. Soprattutto considerando gli imprevisti, come l’Archivio Centrale dello Stato che ho trovato chiuso per restauro proprio durante la mia permanenza a Roma.

Cosa ti affascina di Roma?
È una città bellissima e molto dinamica: eventi, associazioni, lotte e solidarietà si trovano ovunque. Tutto questo avviene tra i monumenti romani, sui sampietrini, e tra il vociare delle persone per strada. Per esempio, è stato incredibile passare davanti al Circo Massimo o al Colosseo circondata da cartelli, slogan e canti durante la manifestazione del 25 novembre, tra il fumo dei fumogeni viola di Non Una Di Meno.

Il futuro per te è…
Preoccupante. Mi spaventano sia la deriva che la politica e la crisi ambientale stanno prendendo che la reazione passiva che abbiamo assunto nei loro confronti come società.