This presentation examines the differences in the musical practices of Turkish-born Alevi immigrants in Australia at online and in-person festivals, and how the Internet affects the way they construct their reflexive identities in their new home. Consequently, I will examine their construction of audio-visual identities and the otherness on the liminal space of the Internet. Here, the Internet can be considered agency that has appeared in the Alevis new world. The Alevis, who used to live in the Republic of Turkey, have now migrated to many countries and regions. They are engaged in online activities to connect with the Alevis spread all over the world. These people, considered minorities in Turkey, are searching for new identities on the Internet, a de-territorialized space different from the geographical locations of their home countries and places of migration. The Alevis in Australia are no exception, too. In 2020, due to the spread of the coronavirus, they held a festival on Facebook instead of the annual in-person festival. Their use of music in both in-person and online festivals remains the same, but the content differs. In the in-person festival, the music program is tailored to the geographical location of Australia, a multi-ethnic country with non-Alevi, while the online festival, free from temporal and geographical limitations, is designed with the global Alevi society in mind. It is a composition that can be used as a result of understanding the characteristics of the Internet in order to reflexively interpret itself and present it to society. Here, from the perspective of Adachi using Giddens’s theory of reflexive modernization (Giddens 1994, Adachi 2019), I will examine the way they construct their identities and the otherness as immigrants in a space that transcends multiple boundaries through analyzing music practice at the festival, using Gell’s theory on art and agency.
