After working with Roja at Cabaret Cravache for more than a year, it felt beautiful to finally take the time to step into her world, not as a producer or collaborator, but this time as the person being tied.
Roja comes from Iran and has been passionate about domination and ropes for many years. She is a trans woman, a musician and a rope artist who loves to bring together traditional Iranian music with the art of Shibari.
When I arrived at the beautiful IKSK space in Berlin, on the top floor overlooking the station, I watched Roja getting ready with so much care. She put on her red dress and her black heeled boots, slowly transforming into the character who would guide me through the next few hours.
I already felt moved. Knowing the current situation in Iran and how different the reality can be for people who simply wish to express who they are, I suddenly felt incredibly grateful to live in a place where we have the freedom to explore our identities, our desires and our unconventional passions.
There was something very special about witnessing Roja embody herself so fully.
Before the ropes: building trust
The experience had actually started before we met.
Roja had sent me a detailed questionnaire asking about my physical condition, boundaries and desires. I could choose whether I wanted a purely Shibari experience or whether I was curious to incorporate domination and a D/s dynamic. What I was curious to explore was deep surrender.
When I arrived, we checked in again about how I was feeling in that moment and what kind of experience would feel right for me that day.
We first spent a long moment simply looking into each other’s eyes. Connecting. Breathing. Building a sense of trust together.
Then came the floor play. I enjoyed feeling overpowered by her and discovering how relaxing it could be to stop directing the experience and simply let myself be guided. There was strength in the dynamic, but also a lot of care. Little by little, I felt myself relaxing both into her arms and into her ropes.
Finding freedom in constraint
Roja began tying me on the floor before bringing me gradually into partial suspension and eventually full suspension from the bamboo, moving my body through different positions and attachment points.
It became the longest suspension I had ever experienced. At moments, it was intense. We needed to make small adjustments so my neck and head could relax. Yet I was surprised by how comfortable I remained. Despite being suspended for close to thirty minutes, I experienced almost no numbness.
I could feel the blood rushing toward my face. My whole body was suspended upside down, constrained by the ropes, and yet I felt incredibly peaceful.
My life is often very fast. I am constantly stimulated, with ideas, projects, people and a thousand little things occupying my mind.
Up there, suddenly, there was nothing to organize, decide or worry about.
I could only breathe. There was something incredibly peaceful about having nowhere to go and nothing to do except find peace within the constraint.
For a moment, I started forgetting myself. My body was suspended, but somehow time felt suspended too.
When ropes become music
Throughout the session, there was another element that touched me even more deeply: the music.
At different moments, Roja would take her instrument and play Iranian music for me.
When I was standing tied, there was one melody. When I was suspended, another.
The music became part of the experience, grounding me while simultaneously bringing me somewhere else. It felt as though the ropes were suddenly merging with something ancient and ritualistic.
Later, Roja told me that she had been improvising in response to my movements.
I loved that! Suddenly, this didn’t feel like simply receiving a Shibari session anymore. It felt like being inside an artistic experience being created in real time, specifically for this body, this moment and this encounter.
The ropes, the movements, Roja’s style, my suspended body, the atmosphere of the space and the Iranian melodies all became part of one living composition.
I felt like I had become the piece of art. And because the music was improvised in response to what was happening between us, I knew that this exact experience would never exist again.
Coming back to earth
When Roja finally brought me back to the floor, I felt a strange mixture of relief and longing.
Part of me was happy to come back fully into my body. Another part already missed being suspended.
I felt as though I had been floating in another realm, yet at the same time I was more connected to the here and now than I had been before the session.
Throughout the experience, I felt safe in Roja’s hands. I could feel that she knows her craft and the body deeply, and that allowed me to let go much further. Despite the length and intensity of the suspension, I came back to myself surprisingly quickly.
The freedom to become ourselves
And perhaps unexpectedly, the experience also left me thinking a lot about freedom.
There was something incredibly moving to me about watching an Iranian trans woman bring together ropes, domination, intimacy, personal expression and traditional Iranian music into an artistic language that is entirely her own.
It made me think about how precious it is to have the freedom to decide how we dress, how we express our gender, what we do with our bodies, what we create and which passions we choose to follow.
Living in Berlin, it can sometimes become easy to take this for granted.
That day, I didn’t. I found it particularly beautiful that Roja didn’t have to choose between tradition and experimentation. Traditional Iranian music could coexist with Shibari, queerness, domination and intimacy. Different parts of herself could meet rather than contradict each other and become something completely new.
I found myself dreaming that everyone in this world could experience this kind of freedom: to explore who we are, to express ourselves without fear and to create lives that actually resemble us.
I came out of Roja’s ropes with a profound sense of peace and serenity, but also with gratitude.
Gratitude for her craft, her care and for the freedom we have in Berlin to create and experience spaces like this. And for the people who dare to design worlds where intimacy, difference, art and unconventional forms of expression are allowed to exist.
Because none of this should ever be taken for granted. Perhaps freedom is also something we practice by continuing to create the world we want to live in, and by supporting the people who are creating it with us.
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