ADIRA — Arabic slang for someone with a commanding presence — is a Berlin collective founded in 2023 by Lebanese performer Hassandra and Syrian-German DJ Zuher Jazmati (xanaxattax). It curates club nights, panel discussions, and performances celebrating queer Arab culture, with an asterisk that signals inclusion of non-Arab ethnic minorities and people with roots across Southwest Asia and North Africa. The collective's flagship event, the ADIRA Drag Festival, held its third edition in late October 2024. This year's theme, "Who's Your Diva?!," staged tributes to icons from across the Eastern Mediterranean — Egyptian legend Umm Kulthum, Turkish star Bülent Ersoy, Lebanese pop icon Haifa Wehbe — through drag performances that deliberately complicate the worship. Hassandra performed as Lebanese pop star Elissa, channeling both the singer's romantic discography and her controversial political outspokenness. The festival's conceptual spine is sharper than a typical tribute night. Hassandra frames the diva tributes as exercises in critical fandom: "As queer people, we tend to idealize a lot of pop divas. But these pop divas are very imperfect in their nature." The performance of Elissa specifically "taps into her controversial political opinions," turning admiration into interrogation. The takeaway Hassandra articulates is pointed — never follow any politician, any activist, any pop diva blindly. Hassandra was born in Beirut in 1994, studied theater and stage acting at the Lebanese University, and moved to Berlin in 2017 at age 22, driven partly by Lebanon's deteriorating economic situation. In Berlin, they became embedded in the city's independent art scene and queer nightlife, with drag emerging as another form of expression for the trained actor. Their work explores home, nostalgia, displacement, and queer Arab culture through theatrical intensity, political humor, grotesque aesthetics, and tenderness. The stakes for spaces like ADIRA sharpened dramatically after the deadly Islamist terrorist attack during Berlin's Christopher Street Day pride parade in July. Hassandra describes the impossible bind that followed: as an Arab queer person, "you fall in this position where then you start receiving a lot of racism." The collective's response is to hold both truths simultaneously — grief over the attack and rejection of the racism it fueled. "I think we are being used in a lot of ways as a punching bag for a lot of things that are happening," Hassandra said. ADIRA operates at a specific intersection that most cultural institutions don't serve: queer, Arab, diasporic, and politically literate. Through its events, it creates temporary autonomy zones where identities that dominant culture treats as contradictions can coexist without apology. The model — grassroots, collective, event-driven — is familiar from decades of queer nightlife organizing, but the cultural specificity and the critical intellectual framework around fandom give it a distinctive shape. The real question is whether spaces like ADIRA can sustain themselves as Berlin's political climate hardens. Hassandra's answer is characteristically direct: "There's place for everyone. It's a huge country."
