Estrangement seeks to capture the tension between European cultures and what was once constructed as the ‘Orient’, investigated from different European cultural contexts of London, Gent and Gdansk, as well as Sulaimany and Hawler in Iraqi Kurdistan. While Europe and the Western world are not homogenous in cultural terms, there has often been an insistance on its coherence when confronting the invented face of an undefined enemy. While the West appears to deny having anything culturally in common with this reinvented ‘Other’, Estrangement attempts to find a way to reformulate these relations, and complicate them. Triggered by unfulfilled desire, loss and estrangement, and the fears, obsessions and denials that are produced through contemporary politics and its economic backgrounds – which both appear to be based on cultural constructions, and aimed at destroying them¬ – this project looks beyond simplistic strategies of representation, investigating how these cultures mirror, mimic and reflect one another; how they produce fictions, fragmented comprehensions, and hybridized understandings and misunderstandings. It points critically both at Occidentalism that formulates Europe as a normative concept, and at the legacies of colonialism, recognizing the historic entanglements in the imperial pasts of Britain, Belgium and Poland, and the traces of these in the make-up of these countries today. These questions do not have geographical borders, but rather cultural and psychological ones, thus the project searches for the zones of encounter that are not representative of cultures, but rather individual experiences.