Performance
video installation
by and with
Matthias Breitenbach
Dirk Cieslak
Schokofeh Kamiz
Omid Montazeri
Judith van der Werff
Dramaturgy/Production
Annett Hardegen
Set design primavera°maas
Artistic collaboration
Luisa Grass
Video
Lenny Triefenschal
Technical Support
Miriam Akkermann
supported by:
Hauptstadtkulturfonds
video installation
by and with
Matthias Breitenbach
Dirk Cieslak
Schokofeh Kamiz
Omid Montazeri
Judith van der Werff
Dramaturgy/Production
Annett Hardegen
Set design primavera°maas
Artistic collaboration
Luisa Grass
Video
Lenny Triefenschal
Technical Support
Miriam Akkermann
supported by:
Hauptstadtkulturfonds
State Of Emergency #1-6
or six attempts at the art of hospitality
A performance based on “State Of Emergency”, a travelogue by Navid Kermani. The sensitive observations of the German-Iranian author Navid Kermani in regions at the edge of the world, where a “State Of Emergency” dominates, unfold a quiet power.
These impressions, with their poetic calm and accuracy, create the feeling of an encounter with people in Kashmir, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Palestine and on Lampedusa, the gateway to Europe: an exercise in long-distance love.
The examination of Kermani's texts in the AUSNAHMEZUSTAND series describes various ways of understanding. Understanding means to hold a conversation; in no case is it a dialogue, a debate or a political or ideological dispute.
It is the world behind Lampedusa: the crisis belt that stretches from Kashmir to Pakistan and Afghanistan to Iran to the Arab world and even to the borders and coasts of Europe. Navid Kermani reports from this region, from our immediate neighbourhood, as distant as it may seem to our media. As if by magic, he succeeds in bringing individual fates and situations to life in such a way that world-political and even existential problems that affect us directly suddenly become clear. Even behind Lampedusa lies our world. Text C.H.Beck Verlag
“The act of hospitality can only be poetic.”
Jacques Derrida
We take Kermani's stories as an opportunity to build a place of hospitality in the Vierte Welt. We enter a space where we meet as guests and as hosts. Here, an unwritten right of hospitality is guaranteed. A right of which we actually know nothing (anymore).
The guest/host arrangement becomes the basic theatrical theme of the evenings. But what is hospitality? What can it be? To call out to someone: “Make yourself at home… Help yourself…” is probably to nullify the laws of hospitality.
Are we faced with the task of remembering the laws of hospitality in order to reinvent them? We will do our best, and our hosts, performers Anders Carlsson and Matthias Breitenbach, will meet their respective guests from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tehran, Syria, Palestine and Lampedusa over six evenings. And in doing so, they insist on cultural difference. There is nothing to reconcile and nothing to heal. We live together in a world where the universality of modernity relentlessly continues to inflict wounds. Everything traditional is annihilated. There is no going back. We will have to continue on the path. How? That is what we have to agree on - as Karl Marx put it, under penalty of our downfall.
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or six attempts at the art of hospitality
A performance based on “State Of Emergency”, a travelogue by Navid Kermani. The sensitive observations of the German-Iranian author Navid Kermani in regions at the edge of the world, where a “State Of Emergency” dominates, unfold a quiet power.
These impressions, with their poetic calm and accuracy, create the feeling of an encounter with people in Kashmir, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Palestine and on Lampedusa, the gateway to Europe: an exercise in long-distance love.
The examination of Kermani's texts in the AUSNAHMEZUSTAND series describes various ways of understanding. Understanding means to hold a conversation; in no case is it a dialogue, a debate or a political or ideological dispute.
It is the world behind Lampedusa: the crisis belt that stretches from Kashmir to Pakistan and Afghanistan to Iran to the Arab world and even to the borders and coasts of Europe. Navid Kermani reports from this region, from our immediate neighbourhood, as distant as it may seem to our media. As if by magic, he succeeds in bringing individual fates and situations to life in such a way that world-political and even existential problems that affect us directly suddenly become clear. Even behind Lampedusa lies our world. Text C.H.Beck Verlag
“The act of hospitality can only be poetic.”
Jacques Derrida
We take Kermani's stories as an opportunity to build a place of hospitality in the Vierte Welt. We enter a space where we meet as guests and as hosts. Here, an unwritten right of hospitality is guaranteed. A right of which we actually know nothing (anymore).
The guest/host arrangement becomes the basic theatrical theme of the evenings. But what is hospitality? What can it be? To call out to someone: “Make yourself at home… Help yourself…” is probably to nullify the laws of hospitality.
Are we faced with the task of remembering the laws of hospitality in order to reinvent them? We will do our best, and our hosts, performers Anders Carlsson and Matthias Breitenbach, will meet their respective guests from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tehran, Syria, Palestine and Lampedusa over six evenings. And in doing so, they insist on cultural difference. There is nothing to reconcile and nothing to heal. We live together in a world where the universality of modernity relentlessly continues to inflict wounds. Everything traditional is annihilated. There is no going back. We will have to continue on the path. How? That is what we have to agree on - as Karl Marx put it, under penalty of our downfall.