It Takes an Opera Village

Christoph Schlingensief ’s Realist Theater Ilinca Todorut First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Ilinca Todorut The right of Ilinca Todorut to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 9780367487539 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032189987 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003042778 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003042778 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC 8 Epilogue It takes an Opera Village Checkered Christoph Schlingensief ’s body of work is on the one hand politically compassionate and artistically challenging, driven by a fearless quest for fairer modes of coexisting. Viewed from a different angle, the same work bares entitlement and an opportunistic streak that can fall into the exploitative.1 Schlingensief ’s dual, irreconcilable investments in redemptive western art and world-restorative politics aggrandize themselves at each polarity in his magnum opus project where he founded an Opera Village in Burkina Faso. Regarded as the crown jewel of his legacy into which he poured his last, fervent energies as he was dying from lung cancer, Schlingensief ’s final project was designed to uncompromisingly “erase the division between art and life,” as his widow Aino Laberenz puts it.2 Schlingensief ’s work in Africa can be narrated as the account of another white male European renewing his art by pillaging non-western cultures, appropriating popular forms and less privileged subjects. The tale of the Opera Village can also take shape as the account of a realist artist orchestrating a project with a concrete positive social impact, and even as the story of a visionary leaving as testament a patch of intercultural, heterogeneous utopia exemplary of another, better possible world.3 That opposing interpretations can exist simultaneously will ensure Schlingensief ’s continued fascination, even more so than if his work could be easily pegged as either unquestionably contestatory or conservative. The indeterminacy turns Schlingensief into a quintessential twenty-first-century European realist artist grappling (and compelling us to do the same) with the schizoid history of social progress, of artistic and technological pinnacles, achieved through colonialism, theft, genocide, slavery, and environmental abuse. Europe’s parceling of the world with the help of denigrating “us vs them” discourses justifying imperialism—where the constructs of a “black,” “primitive,” “undeveloped” Africa all but begged the intervention of a “white,” “developed,” “western” civilization—casts shadows over a German artistic enterprise on the soil of Burkina Faso. Schlingensief ’s last play was the 2010 stage production Via Intolleranza II, named after and containing some elements from Luigi Nono’s anti-fascist DOI: 10.4324/9781003042778-8 156 Epilogue opera Intolleranza 1960 (dedicated to his father-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg). The play was an offshoot of the Opera Village project developed in Burkina that simultaneously criticized the Opera Village’s insurmountable problems and functioned as a funding campaign for it, requesting donations from the public. With an approximate cast of nine Burkinabè and 12 German actors (including Schlingensief when he was able to perform), Via Intolleranza II reveled in laying out issues of colonial display, exoticization, exploitation, and appropriation. The show combined personal accounts from the performers’ real lives with fictionalized biographies and dramatized scenes, interspersing songs, dances, and monologues on the spectrum from the stereotypically traditional to the abrasively mocking of cultural assumptions. From a desk, Schlingensief recounted parts of his search for the site of the Opera Village that inevitably connected him with the genealogy of European explorers seizing African land. The production seemed hyper-conscious of Germany’s history of colonial exhibitions displaying and objectifying black bodies, a history still undigested as evident from episodes such as when the zoo in Augsburg, a south German town, planned in 2005 an “African village” exhibit populated by black musicians, cooks, and artists, all entertaining predominantly white visitors.4 Under the guise of celebrating African culture, Via Intolleranza II seemed wary of propagating the same old colonial clichés in associating the Burkinabè with primitivist notions of vitality, liberated sensuality, or closeness to nature. Via Intolleranza II prodded the still profusely bleeding wounds inflicted by colonialism and suggested that the unwashable spots of blood tainting Lady Macbeth’s European fingers contributed to Schlingensief ’s partly self-redemptive attraction to Africa. What Florian Malzacher calls “the techniques of non-integration and non-resolution that are essential to [Schlingensief ’s] work” seem not so much the calculated products of Schlingensief ’s compassion (nor cynicism) as much as the byproducts of inhabiting a fractured, incoherent, self-contradictory reality.5 His Opera Village was a torn project from the start. The Opera Village is located in a savannah area situated between two villages, Laongo and TambiYargo, and about 40 km or an hour’s drive from Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.6 The Opera Village stands closer, 5 km away, to the provincial capital Ziniaré best known as the former president Blaise Compaoré’s hometown. Compaoré came to power following a 1983 coup that resulted in his predecessor’s assassination, won contested popular elections through the 1990s and 2000s, and in 2014 fled the country as a result of an uprising that was compared by some locals to the Arab spring, according to The Guardian.7 During his presidency, Compaoré decreed the opening of Parc Ziniaré, one of the major local attractions, a large-area, underfunded open air zoo where French tourists complain about the sorry state of tigers, elephants, and giraffes.8 One of the poorest countries on the continent (and in the world), Burkina Faso suffered French colonial occupation until its independence in 1960. Schlingensief commissioned Berlin-based, Burkinabè architect Diébédo Francis Kéré to design the buildings and the Village layout, as well as to manage Epilogue 157 the project during his absences from Burkina. Sibylle Dahrendorf ’s 2012 documentary Crackle of Time narrates in a neat linear fashion the major plot events in the romance between Schlingensief, Kéré, and Burkina Faso: the 2009 “discovery” of its location; the ceremonious laying of the foundation stone in 2010; and the posthumous, commemorative, and tributary opening of the school in 2011. The documentary shrouds Schlingensief ’s arrival at and recognition of the future site of the Opera Village in the nimbus of the miraculous. After spending almost half an hour depicting Schlingensief rejecting other possible locations (and establishing as exposition the unfruitful search through African countries from Cameroon to Mozambique), Dahrendorf slows down the tempo to show Kéré and Schlingensief walking in the savannah on the future Opera Village site as dusk gradually falls. Kéré expounds on “something spiritual here,” while Schlingensief as Holy Fool amps up the performance of mystical revelation as he recounts the divinatory noises he heard, alone with the land, while peeing on it—“a little rattling, a few voices, some birdsong, a dove flew by.”9 Schlingensief remarks in an interposed interview section that these sounds of the nighttime savannah experienced on-site should be recorded and re-played again and again on an LP. The location where one repeatedly starts and stops listening to an LP adds an extra groove, adding the marks of a listener’s habit. In time, the LP would generate a soundscape mixing the recorded natural noises (of fluttering wings, scurrying creatures, and large mammals peeing) with the clicks and hiss of the recording technology, and the hiccups testifying to human manipulation. It is the combination of all of these elements that creates what Schlingensief called “the crackle of time.” Even though the documentary shows two performers staging a foundational moment in quasidivine terms, Schlingensief ’s technological recipe for producing transcendental sound destabilizes essentialist notions of human communion with the sacred purity of nature. In the Opera Village, Schlingensief both rehashed up to a point, and to some extent, detourned and ridiculed the romantic notions with which droves of European artists approached “dark Africa,” the garden variety of quack therapeutic or spiritual searches for regeneration and lost, traditional values in colonized territories.10 In its initial stages, Schlingensief referred to the Opera Village with the Wagnerian appellation of Festspielhaus Afrika, signaling the project as a detournement of Bayreuth: the apex of one’s life-work, a place of pilgrimage at a remove from major urban centers promising salvation through art, with the inversion that the redemptive art flows into the world not from Germany but from Burkina Faso. “Learn from Africa” was one of the Opera Village’s central mottos. Schlingensief charged Africa with taking the baton from Europe in the global venture of a mission salvatrice. The name Festspielhaus Afrika remains in effect today as the non-profit, Berlin-based company managing and operating the Village. Bayreuth as Festspielhaus Afrika replaced the idea of l’art pour l’art, taking the mantle from religion with the idea of art as communal, living practice mapping Bayreuth over the African savannah. Schlingensief envisaged the Opera Village complex on the ambitious scale of a self-sufficient community devoted 158 Epilogue to living together artistically (in the word’s concrete and metaphoric connotations). The compound would satisfy all the basic human needs (where artmaking is as essential as eating) and would fit together housing and residential areas (both for permanent members and for visitors), communal eating areas (restaurant, café, and canteen), garden plots and agricultural areas, recreational areas (a soccer field), administrative areas (offices), medical areas (a hospital, a birth center, a dentist, and a pharmacy), a school (with typical classrooms as well as dedicated spaces for film and music making), additional art and recording studios, and generous storage facilities to support a self-sustaining community.11 In Wagnerian fashion, the community would be able to celebrate itself and its artistic, social, and political achievements in a beautiful festival hall replete with the usual theater stage, work, and rehearsal rooms. Whereas in its initial stages, the concert hall stood at the Opera Village’s epicenter, its primacy was later dethroned by the school and health center. The community would model to the world a manner of productive, intercultural, nature-respectful, socio-artistic organization. The Opera Village was the culmination of Schlingensief ’s work on the medicinal powers of art, and tapped unabashedly into the German romantic dreams of child-like joy in life and creation, and of the ennobling, healing powers of art. Schlingensief once again invoked Joseph Beuys’s concept of making art as Soziale Plastik, an art practice that takes the social fabric as its material. That the culmination of Schlingensief ’s oeuvre, in his own estimation, is a project conceived as a model of living together stands as testimony to the element of cohesiveness through his varied body of work: the realist concern with the practicalities of human fulfillment and the kind of society that allows for it. But as its other romantic-realist predecessors, the Opera Village faltered against a reality not so yielding and compliant to a man’s universal dreams. Kéré came up with an Opera Village design where the Festspielhaus provided the central point from which the rest of the buildings spread out in an organic, spiralizing, conch-shell layout in the African bush with shapes and materials in harmony with the surrounding savannah. Peter Stepan mentions Kéré’s ecoconscious and sustainable plans to use locally produced unburnt bricks and fast growing eucalyptus wood, as well as ingenious, energy-efficient solutions to environmental challenges, such as the concert hall’s flying roof that diverts rising hot air, and naturally cools down the temperature.12 As per Magnus Echtler’s account, by 2015, all major Opera Village buildings, except the most architecturally complex and expensive festival hall, had been constructed.13 Presided over by Aino Laberenz in the role of Cosima Wagner, the Opera Village today boasts of a functional school and dispensary, as well as of a cultural program that includes residencies and activities such as an arts camp in 2011 and a 2013 drumming session. Lacking Schlingensief ’s talent for coming up with advertising and donor campaigns, for selling cultural prestige and publicity in return for patronage, for returning the investments of western cultural public funds like the Federal Cultural Foundation and the Goethe Institute, the site of the grand concert hall languishes in the Burkinabè savannah, becoming one with Epilogue 159 its environment. The hastily dug out foundation for the never-built large Festspielhaus turns into a swampy pond during the rainy season. Schlingensief ’s founding motto—“Our opera is a village, a social resonating body”—welcomes the virtual visitors on the front page of the project’s website.14 On the same web page, a promotional mini-documentary shot by Sandra Schaede and Robert Kummer solicits donations by showing the activities undertaken by Operndorf Afrika in 2019, ten years after its foundation. Opera Village school director Abdoulaye Ouedraogo talks about the 174 local pupils enrolled in six classes and about the unique curriculum teaching in a proportion of about 80% a standard fare, while 20% of lessons consist of artistic training in music, film, animation, dance, and photography.15 The documentary portrays children enthusiastically making art with the help of dedicated Burkinabè pedagogues and even artists invited from neighboring countries. No white person appears in the documentary with the exception of Laberenz, who occasionally walks the viewer through the unglamorous but solid constructions in the locally administered Opera Village compound, and who must be credited for her efforts to keep it afloat. The short documentary also depicts events organized under the Opera Village aegis that celebrate its pupils (such as a children’s film festival combining workshops with screenings of African movies showing diverse African realities and identities) and the local community (a film projection organized in Laonga village attended by most villagers). Although functional on a more modest scale than the world-historical visions projected by Schlingensief, it would be unfair to deny the Opera Village its social-service accomplishments. Then again, traditional missionary schools and hospitals also provided needed services even as they helped consolidate imperialist dominion. How different is the Opera Village from its colonial predecessors? It seems like a stretch to maintain that the Opera Village achieved in practice a completely non-hierarchical, decolonial “union of bodies of knowledge from different cultures,” as Elke aus dem Moore articulates Schlingensief ’s artistic intention, especially when describing paternalistically how it “enable[d]” the Burkinabè to make art.16 The Opera Village plotted an artwork of the future marrying Europe and Africa, crowning as authentic the mongrel intercultural. As progressive as the embrace of hybridity may be, the Opera Village attempted a merger by still positing the essentialist distinctions between “us” versus “them,” contrasting “Europeans” or “Westerners” with “Africans.” Franz Fanon famously referred to this divisive imperialist logic as the Manicheism of domination. Schlingensief ’s hymns to the vitality and unspoiled nature of the African land and “the African” that can teach the European a forgotten lesson or two repeated the “benevolent,” colonial paternalism that asserted dominance by spraying the perfume of humanism over the stench of superiority. Schlingensief ’s “African” might be just another figment of an entitled white man’s imagination projecting repressed, undervalued alterities and aspects of existence over a stick-figure Black, the Magical Negro out of touch with the living realities of a flesh-and-blood person, designed solely as supporting character for 160 Epilogue the white protagonist’s journey. To paraphrase Marianna Torgovnick, Schlingensief ’s attraction to rural Burkina Faso betrayed “the same secret as always: the primitive can be—has been, will be (?)—whatever Euro-Americans want it to be.”17 The Opera Village afforded a way to purge the hopelessness experienced at home through projecting on a place and a people a wish to transcend modern culture. A general idea of “Africa” served Schlingensief as a “symbolic entity” yearning for pre- or post-capitalist utopian worlds.18 Schlingensief repeatedly confessed his ignorance of Africa, with a similar nonchalance with which he upheld that he wasn’t interested in the real, historical figure of Richard Wagner.19 But being raised on Wagnerism cannot compare with the type of domineering presumptions Schlingensief internalized about Africa while growing up. Whereas Wagner’s work was rooted in his own heritage, Schlingensief risked ignorant appropriation when it came to his use of Burkinabè cultural products, as, for example, Andrea Reikat faults the use of ritual masks during an Opera Village event.20 He often “borrowed” with a white artist’s presumption that he can take anything from anyone, regardless of its meaning and importance in the culture that produced it. The enduring European Africanisms sprouting like weeds in the foundations of the Opera Village are due to Schlingensief ’s disheartening reluctance to learn about Africa before learning from Africa. The mystical fable portrayed in Dahrendorf ’s documentary of hearing the land speak to Schlingensief in the night remade the countless personal accounts of European travelers’ preternatural communions with the land in their colonial dominions. Such narratives justified their presence there by virtue of an intimate type of understanding between themselves and the environment, a type of superior knowledge (judged deeper than even the native one) which does not call for any attempts to learn. In western cultural fantasies, the categories of “delinquents,” “the mad,” “children,” and “savages” encapsulate a yearning for alterities. Having already worked with the first two categories embodied by neo-nazis and disabled actors, respectively, Schlingensief seemed to tick items off a bucket list by waxing poetic about the unspoiled eyes of Burkinabè children, borrowed eyes that allow us to experience the world through their perspective. Schlingensief talked about giving local children film cameras and bringing their films back to Germany so Europeans can see anew. This is what Schlingensief meant by another oft-repeated Opera Village mantra: “Stealing from Africa.” The phrase referenced the African lands, artifacts, and lives pillaged by colonial agents through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ punitive raids, invasions, and expropriations. Brought back to Europe as knickknacks and souvenirs, the ritual bronzes and wood carvings catalyzed modernism, allowing artists like Picasso to see anew and articulate a formal language distinct from the Renaissance tradition. The trope of the depleted privileged white dying of ennui who receives blood transfusions from parasitic contact with the lively underprivileged thrives in the western cultural imagination manifesting itself in a trove of cultural products like blockbuster movies and bestselling books about enlightening journeys to the east, eye-opening infiltrations among the natives, revitalizing contacts with Epilogue 161 the lower classes. The trope’s insistent recurrence might suggest that western culture knows that its supremacy is dependent on exploiting the rest of the world. Europe would not have flourished without the massive inputs of slave labor, decimation of resistant populations, and land and resource theft ongoing since the fifteenth century. As Fanon plainly stated it, “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World.”21 Even as Schlingensief attempted to detourn the still dominant narrative of the Western World helping, patronizing, and investing in the Third World by inverting the story and embracing the frank lingo of stealing from Africa, in practice, the Opera Village replicated much of the standard European investment. In his 1970s historical study, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney showed that foreign financial investments and development aid granted to postcolonial countries maintain the structures of dependence by keeping Third World economies focused on the export of raw materials and monocultures produced with massively underpaid labor and at the expense of continued decimation of domestic social conditions.22 The practice of development aid prolongs the imperialist fiction of positive intervention and moralist high ground with the illusion of magnanimous financial gifts, when the gift is a small portion out of a bounty plundered from the colonies, repackaged as a Trojan Horse designed to extract more wealth. When I visited the Opera Village website in 2017, its front page quoted Schlingensief ’s statement that “the opera village is not . . . a development aid project,” a protestation that reveals an unwanted, but unavoidable comparison.23 Functioning in its shrunken dimension of a primary school and dispensary, the Opera Village hardly reflects its title. Like any mission to Africa, it requests donations from western citizens and institutions for the maintenance of said educational and medical services. Magnus Echtler sees the Opera Village as not very different from the countless other missionary stations that pose both as development aid businesses and as institutions for spiritual salvation, with the notable difference that “the Opera Village substitutes transcendental religion with transcendental art.”24 As it did for Wagner, the Festspielhaus becomes the new church. The Opera Village set itself up to simultaneously “satisfy and frustrate the demands of economy and art.”25 If prior to the Opera Village, Schlingensief ’s projects could pride themselves on their high-art, transgressive aura resisting commodification, argues Echtler, as an NGO the Opera Village has to compete for funds as an aid business and prove its social usefulness. Echtler perceives a sly sleight-of-hand where the Opera Village attracted donors through touting its art pedigree and promising the “unproductive waste” of immaterial cultural exchange.26 In its institutional formation, the Opera Village propagates the illusion of a dependence upon the West, instead of fostering a self-sustained, locally attuned organization. In an article questioning from its title whether “The Schlingensief Opera in Burkina Faso: [is] A (Poisoned?) Gift,” Andrea Reikat answers unmistakably in the affirmative after a 2015 visit to the Opera Village. Reikat argues that the Opera Village is not a site of positive intercultural exchange because 162 Epilogue the local people have no sense of ownership over it. When interviewing locals, Reikat reports that they do not perceive the Opera Village as anything other than a (possibly underused) school and a dispensary, no different than the other public schools and health centers in the area. The Opera Village, according to Reikat, betrays its ignorance of local culture and has no substantial impact on the Burkinabè art scene or society. Reikat describes the Opera Village as “a top-to-bottom steering structure with instructions and ideas being developed in Germany,” exclusionary of local villagers and Burkinabè artists from management and decision-making.27 In 2021, the Opera Village website stresses that “over the long term . . . the ongoing operating and administrative costs, as well as the budget of the cultural program in Burkina Faso” should be transferred over locally from the Berlin-based Festspielhaus Afrika gemeinnützige GmbH, without specifying a clear time frame or handing-over plans.28 Wilfried Zoungrana, by contrast, one of Schlingensief ’s Burkinabè collaborators who assisted him as translator as well as performed in Via Intolleranza II, argues that the Opera Village contributes non-negligibly to the area’s cultural infrastructure. Zoungrana defends Schlingensief by painting him as a postcolonial (as opposed to neo-colonial) artist who criticized the lack of African self-representation in the west, the lack of recognition for Africa’s contributions to western culture, and the way African cultural products are measured against ill-fitting western standards. Schlingensief wanted German TV to air whatever the Burkinabè would be sending as art, without imposing western aesthetic judgments. This would allow African art to enlarge Euro-American ideas of art. Schlingensief, as seen by Zoungrana, celebrated postcolonial difference and “seem[ed] to vindicate an African identity in itself, which does not rely on external sources of justification.”29 Furthermore, Zoungrana perceives the Opera Village performing a detournement of development aid, by exposing the clichés of “needy” Africa and its seemingly ubiquitous big-bellied, vermininfested, starving children instrumentalized by humanitarian businesses. As opposed to “assistance with a hidden agenda,” Zoungrana’s Schlingensief modeled a form of unconditional aid, where the recipients were supposed to do whatever they wanted with the money and had the one obligation to broadcast their cultural products on western media.30 “I want to finally be able to give money without expecting anything in return,” quotes Zoungrana from Schlingensief ’s lines printed in an unpublished script of Via Intolleranza II.31 The Opera Village beckons more as an unfulfilled idea rather than its partial materialization. That the project is more fascinating in its theoretical articulation rather than its dwarfed reality may provide a damning indictment of Schlingensief ’s inflated artistic practice. But it also enlists him in a German tradition of conjuring imaginary theaters that cannot take shape in a world lacking the means to produce them and allow for their existence. These imaginary theaters demand another world and plant a desire for the conditions in which the Opera Village may actually be possible. Carl Hegemann recounts how Schlingensief “explained meticulously why all aid to Africa, including his own, does not make sense and is wrong, and nevertheless ‘because of that’ Epilogue 163 32 asked for donations for the Opera Village.” Schlingensief ’s justifications for the Opera Village show both the hocus-pocus he kept pulling out of his sleeve to get money, as well as the courage to mount a confrontation against what-is for the benefit of what-else-could-be. Medicine man, healer, and hope dealer Responding to a request for comment on the fact that people “complain about a total lack of hope in [his] writing,” Heiner Müller wrote back with Teutonic panache: “I am neither a dope- nor a hope-dealer.”33 Schlingensief ’s work often despaired over a seemingly intractable state of affairs, a depressingly deeprooted foundational violence, a reality that “does not make sense and is wrong” in so many ways. Yet, as for his predecessors—politicized artists of collective hurt and destitution like Ibsen, Brecht, Kluge, Fassbinder, or Beuys—there’s a “stubbornly redemptive” streak, to use Stuart Jeffries’ appreciation of Walter Benjamin’s thought, an insistent commitment to the possibility of change.34 Nowhere is Schlingensief ’s political optimism more manifest than in the proceedings for creating the Opera Village, a project mired in imperialism yet striving toward a future condition of decoloniality. In speeches, Schlingensief repeatedly exclaimed that “Art can heal!”35 Even when in doubt, and framing it as a question—can art heal?—Schlingensief seemed to think that the small chance it might was worth the trouble. And if art can’t heal, at least it must try. At the selfish level, the healing Schlingensief sought was of his own being battling with cancer. Working on a project that unabashedly celebrated productive life (as opposed to the Wagnerian funereal odes) must have had a therapeutic function. On limited occasions, Schlingensief uttered expectations of how the Opera Village may benefit Burkina Faso. In the speech he gave at the laying of the foundation stone ceremony, Schlingensief touched on the problems faced by Burkina, mentioning “the question of equitable distribution” and “how art might be able to solve these issues in new ways” by allowing “new forces to emerge.”36 But besides such generalities, Schlingensief tended to promote the Opera Village as a detournement of development aid practices where Africa helps the West. The Opera Village was designed to have a curative effect on sick western society by spearheading a healthier way of coexisting. Schlingensief remained his own critic of the search for healing in Africa. As Lehmann, Siegert, and Vierke point out, the disease-focused 2009 production Mea Culpa mocked the “delusional search for salvation” in the quest for an African Opera Village.37 Schlingensief ’s unfulfilled plans for the German Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale would have combined a spa offering therapeutic treatments with a colonial exhibition, all bearing the title of “African Wellness Center.” Susanne Gaensheimer details the “exaggeration and caricature” of the planned curative services and sanatorium facilities (including a swimming pool with tinted water that would “purge” whiteness).38 Laying out the bulbous growth of the wellness industry trading in exoticization of non-western 164 Epilogue practices, Schlingensief exposed his own complicity to the fears of disease, discomfort, and disasters that fuel the economy, from the food industry to the financial sector doling out insurances. Via Intolleranza II criticized the Opera Village’s naiveté, ridiculed its propagation of stereotypes, and seemed self-conscious about its essentialization of African identities.39 And still, if Schlingensief used Africa as an emblem for otherness, he framed it as a positive alterity, shifting the accent from the continent’s instances of poverty, famine, and disease proliferating in the mass media, to Africa’s potential for production of creative ways of social, political, economic organization. The strategy groups Schlingensief with other anti-colonialists. In Via Intolleranza II, an issue of Africa Positive magazine sparked remarks about how the title brings to mind the diagnosis HIV positive. Against such connotations, Schlingensief, like Benjamin, turned words and concepts on their heads. In Benjamin’s essay Naples co-written with Asja Lācis, the authors admiringly compared the Italian city with the South African kraal because of a sense of communal ownership and governance: “life bursts not only from doors, not only into front yards, where people on chairs do their work,” but into the streets where people work, socialize, play, relax, and even sleep.40 While the houses and yards delimit a private sphere, the people valorize the public spaces as shared loci of activity. Public spaces aren’t mere places of consumption with entry regulated by money. Lācis and Benjamin used the word “kraal” to designate an anarchic social utopia. The word, however, originated as an insult to South African communities. Stuart Jeffries quotes from lexicographer Charles Pettman’s 1913 book, Africanderisms that the word “kraal” “seems to have been introduced by the Dutch [colonists] and applied somewhat contemptuously at first to the Hottentot and Kaffir holdings and villages,” in a way to “suggest that Africans lived like cattle.”41 Detournements of colonial prejudice are foundational for quests of self-determination. Walter Rodney positively revalorized the colonial injunction against African cultures for being “stateless” (and hence “backward” and “savage”), by arguing how small political units without significantly wide social stratifications do not require a “machinery of government coercion.”42 Hal Foster cements the reversal with the hint of intentionality from pre-colonial cultures who fostered “a society not without but against the state.”43 When in the staging of Parsifal at Bayreuth Schlingensief visibly placed the words “kral” and “gral” next to each other, it was suggestive of an identification of hope with a mode of recovered communal living. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Schlingensief announced that the Opera Village “shall become a Gesamtkunstwerk where people live and are encouraged to study the highest form of art, the art of living together.”44 The Opera Village as Schlingensief ’s Bayreuth implied a re-inscription over the meaning of Gesamtkunstwerk, an attempt at purging the totalitarianism out of aesthetic ideals.45 The Opera Village projected the Gesamtkunstwerk’s synthesis of the arts and the social body as a Brechtian montage of disparate parts, as an assemblage of non-unified elements allowing for pluralistic cultural formations. Such an Aesthetic State would form not a nation state, but a racially Epilogue 165 and culturally hybrid global polity, in the sense of these terms similar to Homi Bhabha’s, predicated on difference without hierarchization. Opposed to facile notions of multiculturalism enacting a “spurious egalitarianism” between the fetishized diversity of essentialized cultures displayed in colorful posters for diversity, Bhabha envisages an international world recognizing the hybridity of all races and cultures where national histories remain staunchly anti-nationalist.46 The Opera Village’s syncretism pushed beyond just an acknowledgment of the cultural hybridity produced by colonial violence toward envisioning a state of non-hegemonic mixing that resists domineering power dynamics such as between a mainstream and a periphery. The Opera Village’s cultural métissage, desiring to combine local elements (such as Kéré’s architecture, or African music) with European components (nineteenth-century theater buildings, Wagner), might suggest that its idea of (non)unity in difference points to a trans-national, heterogeneous collective, not to a hastily celebrated cultural exchange between monolithic blocks defined and divided by ideas of nation or race. The set of images, gestures, and utterances weaving and confusing African with European cultural practices can be seen as Schlingensief ’s labor of mixture that challenged stable cultural identities and entrenched narratives such as Europe’s artistic supremacy.47 Via Intolleranza II meshed classical and contemporary music and dance from both continents, trailblazing through ballet, African song and dance, opera, hip-hop, modern European tunes sung by Burkinabè actors, and Burkinabè melodies joined in by the German actors. In the Opera Village’s anti-essentialist, anti-Bayreuthian, postcolonial vision of global community, all individual and collective identities do an unending dance of coming together and coming apart, attracting and repulsing each other. All identities are impure, mixed, porous to the influences from the Outside and the Others, even as asserting purity, strict borders, fixity, and independence. In his journal, Schlingensief noted that Via Intolleranza II, and presumably the Opera Village as a whole too, at times seduced itself with “a great feeling of [a unified, harmonious] community,” but snapped out of it, and with Schlingensief, asked: “What sort of crap is it to think that we’d now all have to hold hands or something. It is important to understand that we actually don’t fit together at all.”48 Dahrendorf made the excellent choice to place at the start of Crackle of Time Schlingensief saying that the Opera Village “is about people and each person is blurred,” rejecting claims to essentialist ways of cultural belonging or of being, posing a state of hybridity intolerant of simplified polarizations such as “us” versus “them.”49 At its theoretical best, the Opera Village rewires understandings of art as cultural expression to always have meant inter-cultural manifestation, not a celebration of monolithic identities. The process of positive revalorization, however, can easily entrap itself into newly forged essentialisms. Examining the thick Festspielhaus Afrika booklet (2009) made by Schlingensief and Thomas Goerge, Fabian Lehmann illustrates how it presents “the ancient operatic rituals in Africa” as unacknowledged fountainhead of European art.50 Part historically accurate and part invented in a reality-and-fiction montage à la Kluge that induces critical activation with the 166 Epilogue spice of the dramatized, Schlingensief ’s alternate historiography placed Africa at the root of Wagner’s (and Europe’s) art, subverting the dominant story of the Greco-Roman world as the cradle of European civilization. An early drawing of Festspielhaus Afrika portrayed the compound as kraals arranged into forming Bayreuth’s ground plan.51 In one instance, an alleged African ritual object bears a striking resemblance to Bayreuth’s floor plan, as the narrative recounts how the fetish arrived in the possession of Otto Bruckwald, the architect of Bayreuth. While such visual “affinities” served before to argue for the “universality” of western art (as in the MoMA’s controversial 1984 “Primitivism in the 20th Century” exhibition),52 the booklet gestures toward enthroning Africa as the Ur-source and final destination of human civilization. The narrative on the one hand salutes the revisionist historical scholarship detailing African influences upon ancient Greece and other myriad cultural exchanges, while on the other hand smacks of romantic fabulations about esoteric Africa. Trading one essentialism for another in his zeal for positive revalorization, Schlingensief can be criticized with the same points raised by Franz Fanon and Wole Soyinka against the Négritude movement in that it remains beholden to colonialist dichotomous logic and insensible to the specifics and variety of African realities. Schlingensief refers to opera in his journal, Brecht-style, as “the quintessential term for the elitist glamor of [European] high culture.”53 The seeming Eurocentric designation of Opera Village named the Burkinabè compound after an art genre that shortcuts in most people’s brains to western high art. In Ich weiß, ich war’s, Schlingensief confesses to having chosen the name precisely because “it invited misunderstandings,” and forced examinations of ideas of art, what it does, and what doing good and helping out mean in general.54 The point made by the term “Opera Village” is not just that opera isn’t a pure European creation and that the art form has African manifestations, but that it throws a gauntlet at the very notion of “high art.”55 In his laying of the foundation stone ceremony speech, Schlingensief tauntingly imagines how visitors will come expecting to see opera singers and instead they will hear the screams of newborns from the clinic.56 Or at the very least, they will see Burkinabè children and adults doing theater, dance, storytelling, music, film, and not necessarily any opera at all. In his autobiography, Schlingensief writes that we must “blow up” high culture, in the sense of “simply let[ting] people in who have nothing to do with it and who then give it strength again.”57 Schlingensief ’s call for the democratization of the idea of art may sound progressive, but it also regresses to certain colonial tropes. The curative notion of artistic regeneration of an exhausted organism through infusions of alien, fortifying elements (here, the Burkinabè) brings to mind the romantic colonial visions delivered in patriarchal sexual metaphors. As Marcia Klots adroitly puts it, German colonial lobbyists wove a benevolent benefactor fantasy where they were presented to “behave as loving fathers to native children and as doting husbands to colonial wives,” forming mutually advantageous relationships.58 At significant times, Schlingensief criticized with clear statements and actions the continued strength of the benefactor narrative. He barked against Europeans Epilogue 59 167 going to Africa to help, an idea that he decreed “is bullshit.” The 1999 stage play The Berlin Republic or The Ring in Africa derided its character Gerhard Schröder for wanting to “help” Namibia. In 2005, Schlingensief apologized for the German 1904–1907 genocide of the Herero and Nama that exterminated up to 110,000 people.60 All through the past century, the German government refused to issue an apology. In 1998, the Herero filed a US class-action lawsuit against the German government and Deutsche Bank seeking reparations and a formal apology.61 An official apology from a head of state arrived only in 2016, issued by president Norbert Lammert, who finally recognized German measures during the Herero-Nama wars as acts of genocide. In May 2021, foreign minister Heiko Mass issued the statement that Germany has plans to roll out a reparation deal with Namibia in the shape of development projects (whose main beneficiaries will likely not be the descendants of the murdered HereroNama people).62 No actual reparations have to date been granted. Given Schlingensief ’s vocal attacks on the German government’s deliberate amnesia and his practice of self-criticism and self-exposures, his own detournements of missionary discourse and practice demand careful examination. Magnus Echtler reminds of the Opera Village’s parallels with other mission stations famed for the local impacts of their hospitals or schools, such as the nineteenth-century mission school of Ekukhanyeni run by John Willian Colenso, bishop of the British colony of Natal in present-day South Africa.63 Colenso was excommunicated for the heresy of interpreting the Bible with acknowledged Zulu influences, as well as for challenging the distinctions between civilized and savage, and the hierarchies of dominance and influence. Echtler also recollects Lambaréné, the christian hospital in present-day Gabon, the life-work of Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer. The theologian turned humanitarian Schweitzer, also a classically-trained musician, declared, just like Schlingensief, that the “sweetest sound” he ever heard was not Bach, but the sound of a black baby suddenly crying from the next room, a cry indicative that a life-threatening disease had been broken.64 Echtler does not deny the accomplishments of such mission work, achievements similar to the Opera Village’s stated goals, but doesn’t obfuscate either these institutions’ imbrication within the larger project of colonialism, where, for example, mission schools gave pupils the skills to supply labor to a colonial economy. Echtler cites Jung’s critique of Schweitzer’s savior complex and his crack at the latter’s work in Gabon: “where better to go than Africa where the doctor is worshipped.”65 Has the Opera Village succeeded in translating and sustaining in practice its theoretical project of hybridity and heterogeneity, or has it merely replicated the hierarchy of the “benevolent” adventurer investing German funds into a project whose most evident result has been an added entry in Schlingensief ’s artistic C.V.? Can Schlingensief be faulted for dragging along a project whose contradictions were plain to see from the start, driven by a death wish to go out with a bang? The Opera Village’s vision of a yet-non-existent decentralized world smashed against an imperialist establishment. Can the Opera Village project be justified in its limited, imperfect actualization through its very failure, through 168 Epilogue what it tried and couldn’t be, a botched experiment that nonetheless—for a little while—shaped up something different as potentiality? Twentieth-century western thinkers, Adorno to Lehmann, would agree that this pointing to a not-yet is art’s function par excellence. The Opera Village’s failure can also be framed positively in Brechtian terms of theater as an awkward but relevant rehearsal for redistribution. One problem with settling on this feel-good narrative conclusion is that Schlingensief himself would balk at it. As a realist, Schlingensief strived in his projects for actual, concrete impacts, even if he continuously questioned the power of art to do so. His projects lobbied for altered social and governmental practices surrounding reunification, commemoration, disability, immigration, and international relations with formerly colonized countries. He laughed at people who considered themselves politically active by merely protesting in the streets; at artists who pictured themselves as revolutionaries for just broaching political subject matter; at artists preaching to the Volksbühne choir; at artists doing art that’s “pointless,” thus imagining that they opt out of the market; at art that prides itself in challenging perception; at art that’s intentionally not “of the moment” and doesn’t sell; and at any of these contemporary tropes fashionable with artists despairing about our complicity with a downright villainous system. Honoring Schlingensief means holding him up to his own standards and being honest enough to acknowledge that sometimes a failure is a plain failure. Art worth A baneful mistake in the Opera Village’s conception was that it preserved too much of the Gesamtkunstwerk’s submission to one person’s totalitarian control, the Artist—in this case, Schlingensief. Even though some efforts were made to relinquish the orchestra conductor’s baton and nurture an Opera Village that would become a collective endeavor, the project was dominated by Schlingensief ’s vision and decisions, hence suffering in its development from his demise. More importantly, this model of authoritarian artistic production was antithetical to the project’s aspirations. If the Opera Village was to be a pluralist cultural and political experiment, it ought to have rejected from the start the leadership of any single person along with the western concept of the “artist.” As Azoulay showed, the western-crafted persona of the visionary single individual who directs whole groups of people into his blueprint of emancipation works with the imperialist tools of sovereignty over others and “destines these quests to exercises in dispossession,” regardless of any positive aspects of the blueprint itself.66 Schlingensief kept encouraging donors to make unconditional payments, without having any expectations of what would happen with the money. During his monologue in Via Intolleranza II, Schlingensief stated that “it’s important to give money and say: ‘Do what you want with it.’”67 But he didn’t always subscribe himself to this insight into non-domineering relationships. Maybe Schlingensief should have limited himself to gathering people and organizations around the project, garnering financial and emotional investments in the project, and Epilogue 169 refrained from deciding what to do with the money. The Opera Village could have modeled practices of historical healing, reparations, and newly forged collaborations. Reparations are only reparations if they don’t come with plans attached of what to do with the money. Along with its failure to dispose of the visionary artist notion in favor of practices of art-making as communal doing, the Opera Village was only partially successful in its resistance against western notions of “art.” Smooshing art into life, realist avant-gardists from the dadaists to Brecht and Beuys expanded the concept of art. Even while challenging it, though, they honored the western paradigm of art emergent in the Renaissance. The story of art’s emancipation begun in the Renaissance (a narrative dear to Adorno) from its handmaiden role to monarchical and ecclesiastical authority defends art’s hard-earned independence from the dominance of utilitarian concerns. It prides itself on gaining art’s distanced, critical, politicized edge. The narrative, however, juggles uneasily the aesthetic anti-instrumental ethos with the politicized desire for real-world relevance. The Opera Village intensified the contradiction between making art to impact life and making anti-utilitarian art detectable in all of Schlingensief ’s theatrical projects. Schlingensief ’s work is an illustration of the problem of constructed borders erected between art and politics, haves and haves-not, and colonized and colonizers. Schlingensief ’s work both challenged the limits of art and protected its domain. It defied the hierarchies of colonized and colonizer at the same time that it continued to enforce the differences between the two. Curator and art critic Okwui Enwezor, at the time acting as the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, said in 2012 that he doesn’t conceive of the Opera Village as art, but merely as “a person’s legitimate dream.”68 This might be the biggest compliment one can offer to the Opera Village. Unfortunately, it is only partly true, and in many ways, Schlingensief ’s last project was just another socially insignificant product reeking of luxury and entitlement. Opposed to the triumphal account of art’s emancipation from ecclesiastical and royal patronage in the Renaissance, Azoulay narrates western art history as the tragedy of increased subservience of artisans and communities of makers to mercantile and imperialist power. The artists, the art object, the art expert (deeming whether the object is worthy of investment), the client, and the art market: all emerged together. The work of art took shape “as a precious object, an attribute of power for the one who owns it.”69 Syson and Thornton remind that the words “art” and “artist” emerged only around the fifteenth century in the Italian peninsula.70 In one of its later (and final) appellations, Schlingensief referred to his last project as the Opera Village Remdoogo, using a word in the local Mossi language Mooré that means “place of play,” a denomination translating the Opera Village project into a language that doesn’t have a word synonymous with “art,” nor a long history of art in the western sense.71 The bestowal of the new name gestured toward abandoning the western idea of art and its institutions. Art as articulated in western thought, premised as fundamentally free and apolitical, cannot properly digest overtly socially involved art. Concepts of high art largely ignore the socio-economic contexts and political 170 Epilogue ramifications of cultural production. With the affirmation of the social, political, cultural embeddedness of all art, not only do aesthetic distinctions between politically attuned realisms and politically recoiling formalisms seem minute and pedantic, but so does the connotation of art as a distinct and detached human practice lose its meaning. In its failure, the Opera Village project shows that the sublimation of art cannot be achieved within the paradigms of western art, using the same concepts and institutions that it wants to leave behind. The Opera Village signals toward much more than what someone like Arthur Danto understood by “the end of art.” Danto’s ethnocentric designation of “the end of art” intended to be the epitaph for the progressive narratives of development parceling artistic practice into sanctioned styles, schools, and proper ways of doing within the last 600 years bracketed by Vasari and Clement Greenberg, thus aiming to mark the end of modernist art criticism. Danto saw that art can’t be recognized anymore through mere visual criteria.72 He argued for the identification and appreciation of contemporary artworks freed from narrow stylistic and formal expectations, based on criteria that can move from the strictly aesthetic to the moral, political, social dimensions. For his articulation of the cognitive turn, Danto relied on Hegel, who prophesized the end of art because the Germanic conquest of the Mind rendered passée for him the sensuality of art.73 If Hegel believed philosophy superseded art and religion in its role of torch bearer to the Spirit, Wagner turned Hegel’s teleology on its head by marrying the anticipated new age with the rebirth of art, marking an end to philosophy.74 Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk brings people together as a community mirroring the way in which it solders the arts together, freed from slavery to industry. But the Gesamtkunstwerk’s vilification of monetary gain and industry conflicts with its institutional, laborintensive nature, its need for great financial investments, and its reliance on stage technologies and mechanization. The Gesamtkunstwerk’s self-contradictory nature perpetually defers its goal of social reunification, and also exemplifies Hegel’s warning that the politicized work of art “is a thing divided against itself.”75 Politicized realist art will always contradict itself. It is doomed to be invalidated by the aesthetic framework and the artistic institutions. The prevalent concept of art today is formulated with largely Kantian, universalist aesthetic notions. The conflict between art and decolonial, anti-capitalist politics is irreconcilable because the institution of art itself is imperialist. Another emergent world with recalibrated political and economic systems would not sustain art as we know it today. Notes 1 Minou Arjomand talks about “the inherent conservatism of a figure like Christoph Schlingensief.” “Christoph Schlingensief and Richard Wagner #CheckTheirPrivilege,” The Opera Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 100. Dramaturg Carl Hegemann credits Schlingensief for exposing his own inner contradictions and believes that the constant self-provocation “may have been the force that propelled his work.” “[Ger/Ego]Mania: Art and Non-Art in the Work of Christoph Schlingensief,” in Christoph Schlingensief German Pavilion, ed. Susanne Gaensheimer (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011), 204. Epilogue 171 2 From “Aino Laberenz in Conversation with Chris Dercon,” in Christoph Schlingensief, eds. Klaus Biesenbach et al. (London: Koenig Books, MoMA PS1, 2014), 157. 3 Magnus Echtler reports that the DVD back sleeve of Sibylle Dahrendorf ’s documentary about the Opera Village Crackle of Time (Berlin: Filmgalerie 452, 2012) describes the project as “the touching legacy of a visionary.” “Pissing the Sacred: Schlingensief ’s African Opera Village as a Fundraising Heterotopia,” in Art of Wagnis: Christoph Schlingensief’s Crossing of Wagner and Africa, eds. Fabian Lehmann, Nadine Siegert, and Ulf Vierke (Berlin: Iwalewahaus Bayreuth, 2017), 138. 4 See “Row Over German zoo’s Africa Show,” BBC News, June 8, 2005, http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4070816.stm. 5 Florian Malzacher, “Citizens of The Other Place: A Trilogy of Fear and Hope,” in Christoph Schlingensief: Art Without Borders, eds. Tara Forrest and Anna Teresa Scheer (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2010), 189. 6 For details on the location of the Opera Village I am indebted to Andrea Reikat’s essay “The Schlingensief Opera in Burkina Faso: A (Poisoned?) Gift,” in Art of Wagnis, 151–58. 7 The Guardian quoted Emile Pargui Paré from the opposition Movement of People for Progress in a news article by David Smith, “Burkina Faso: Violent Clashes Over Plans to Extend President’s Rule,” October 31, 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/30/ protesters-storm-burkina-faso-parliament-constitution-vote-president-blaise-compaore. 8 According to reviews on Tripdvisor, https://en.tripadvisor.com.hk/Attraction_Reviewg293769-d3767424-Reviews-or5-Parc_Animalier-Ouagadougou_Centre_Region. html#REVIEWS. 9 Dahrendorf, Crackle of Time, DVD. 10 As scholars like Marianna Torgovnick have shown, notions of the primitive as regeneration abound through western culture’s engagement with its colonized other and constitute the other side of the coin of the more overtly domineering notions of the primitive as degeneration. Torgovnick argues that “Western idealizatons of the primitive has been as damaging as any other version and often conceals more pejorative views.” Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 122. 11 Information on the extent of planned buildings and facilities was taken primarily from Susanne Gaensheimer’s Introduction to German Pavilion. 12 Peter Stepan, “’We Want to Steal from Africa’: Christoph Maria Schlingensief ’s First Visit to Ouagadougou,” in Art of Wagnis, 238. 13 Echtler, “Pissing the Sacred,” 142. 14 www.operndorf-afrika.com/en/. 15 Sandra Schaede and Robert Kummer, dirs., “10 Years Opera Village Africa,” Vimeo, 2009, https://vimeo.com/406498640. 16 Elke aus dem Moore, “Foreword,” in Christoph Schlingensief German Pavilion, 15. 17 Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 9. 18 Ibid., 153. 19 In a conversation with Alexander Kluge, Schlingensief uttered candidly: “For me this is beautiful when it comes to Wagner: I understand him just as little as I understand Africa.” Quoted by Fabian Lehmann, Nadine Siegert, and Ulf Vierke, “Practicing the Art of Wagnis,” in Art of Wagnis, 14. 20 Reikat, “The Schlingensief Opera in Burkina Faso,” 157. 21 Franz Fanon, “On Violence,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 58. Or, put in Walter Rodney’s economic terms: “The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth.” How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London and New York: Verso, 2018), 58. 22 In 2002, former World Bank vice president Joseph Stiglitz denounced how philanthropic development aid has “the feel of the colonial ruler” and how globalized markets make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 2002), 40. 172 Epilogue 23 www.operndorf-afrika.com/en/, accessed December 19, 2017. I do not know when these quotes were replaced by new webpage designs. The website quotes Schlingensief in Ich weiß, ich war‘s (Köln: Kipenheuer & Witsch, 2012), 184: “Es muss klar sein: Das Operndorf ist keine Hilfsorganisation, kein Entwicklungshilfeprojekt.” 24 Echtler, “Pissing the Sacred,” 142. 25 Ibid., 138. 26 Ibid., 147. 27 Reikat, “The Schlingensief Opera in Burkina Faso,” 157. 28 Accessed December 23, 2020, www.operndorf-afrika.com/en/vision/. 29 Wilfried Zoungrana, “Rescuing Schlingensief from the Critics,” in Art of Wagnis, 165. 30 Ibid., 166. 31 Regiebuch Via Intollenaza II. Script of the play as of September 23, 2012, Warsaw. Unpublished document, 94. Quoted in Zoungrana, “Rescuing Schlingensief from the Critics,” 167. 32 Hegemann quoted in Jan Endrik Niermann, Schlingensief und das Operndorf Afrika: Analysen der Alterität (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013), 97. Translated by Magnus Echtler in “Pissing the Sacred,” 140. 33 Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York: PAJ, 1984), 140. 34 Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss. The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London and New York: Verso, 2016), xix. 35 Schlingensief uttered the sentence in the speech he gave at the Opera Village laying of the foundation stone ceremony. “Christoph Schlingensief ’s Address at the Groundbreaking Ceremony for the Opera Village on February 8, 2010,” in Christoph Schlingensief German Pavilion, 104. 36 Ibid., 103. 37 Lehmann, Siegert and Vierke, “Practicing the Art of Wagnis,” 18. 38 Susanne Gaensheimer, “Introduction,” in Christoph Schlingensief German Pavilion, 21. 39 See the editors’ “Introduction” in Art of Wagnis, as well as Magnus Echtler’s contribution in the same volume. 40 Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, “Naples,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 171. 41 Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 97. For the quote from Charles Pettman’s, Africanderisms (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1913), Jeffries directs to archive.org. 42 Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 54. 43 Hal Foster, “The ‘Primitive’ Unconscious of Modern Art,” in Primitivism and TwentiethCentury Art: A Documentary History, eds. Jack Flam and Miriam Deutch (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003), 387. 44 “Christoph Schlingensief ’s Address at the Groundbreaking Ceremony,” in Christoph Schlingensief German Pavilion, 103. 45 Matthew Wilson Smith reminds that the term “Gesamtkunstwerk” implies “an art form as much about unity, community, as about totality,” with an approximate English translation vying between “total work of art,” “communal work of art,” “combined work of art,” and “unified work of art.” From Bayreuth to Cyberspace: The Total Work of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 8–9. 46 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 352. Bhabha lays the ground for an idea of human community and international relations that rejects the assumptions of “homogenous national cultures” and “ ‘organic’ ethnic communities.” Ibid., 7. 47 As Lee Chambers sees it, the assertion of an “African Wagnerism” merges the stereotypes of European professionalized, artistic sophistication with those of African culture as embodied, communal experience to produce a cultural third term defined mostly by it being at the crossroads of cultures, shared living, and of art and politics. “ ‘In This Village, Art is Life’: Selfhood, Social Architecture and the Operatic Imagination in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Art of Wagnis, 182. Epilogue 173 48 “. . . ein tolles Gefühl der Gemeinschaft. . . . Was ist denn das für ein Quatsch, zu glauben, wir müssten uns jetzt alle an die Hände fassen oder so was. Wichtig ist zu begreifen, dass wir eigentlich gar nicht zusammenpassen.” Schlingensief, Ich weiß, ich war’s, 264. 49 Dahrendorf, Crackle of Time, DVD. 50 Fabian Lehmann, “The African Roots of Wagner’s Operas: Schlingensief ’s Unsettling Montage in the Booklet Festspielhaus Afrika,” in Art of Wagnis, 101. 51 According to Lehmann, Siegert, and Vierke, “Practicing the Art of Wagnis,” 13. 52 See Flam and Deutch, Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art. 53 “. . . der Überbegriff für den elitären Glanz der Hochkultur.” Schlingensief, Ich weiß, ich war‘s, 166. Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo also used opera as shorthand for the colonial presumption of cultural superiority justifying imperial exploitation. 54 “Deswegen fand ich den Begriff schon mal gut, weil er zu Missverständnissen eingeladen hat. . . .” Schlingensief, Ich weiß, ich war’s, 167. 55 Zoungrana lists as African operatic forms “the performance of praise-singers, the musical and artistic choreography of traditional dances, the pompous Moro-Naba ceremony.” “Rescuing Schlingensief from the Critics,” 162. Alain Ricard mentions the kantata, “native plein-air opera with African instruments.” “The True Reciprocal Influences Will Evolve Anyways: Political Theatre Between Africa and Europe,” in Art of Wagnis, 178. 56 “Christoph Schlingensief ’s Address at the Groundbreaking Ceremony,” in Christoph Schlingensief German Pavilion, 104. 57 “. . . man muss sie auch sprengen, diese Hochkultur. Nicht zerstören, dass meine ich nicht, sondern man muss einfach Leute reinlassen, die damit eigentlich nichts zu tun haben und die da mal wieder Kraft reingeben.” Schlingensief, Ich weiß, ich war‘s, 166. 58 Marcia Klotz, “Introduction,” in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, eds. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, Sander L. Gilman, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), xii. In the unsavory 1848 speech Wagner delivered before the Dresden Fatherland Association, he urged his country to strengthen itself by joining the Scramble for Africa and founding there a “young Germany” that will be “fertilize[d]” by the glorious German spirit. Wagner’s speech quoted in Susan Arndt, “Richard Wagner: The Myth of Bayreuth,” in Art of Wagnis, 58–9. 59 Schlingensief, Ich weiß, ich war’s, 167. 60 According to Sarah Hegenbart, “Psychic Interiors: Christoph Schlingensief ’ Animatograph,” in Art of Wagnis, 91. 61 Duncan Bartlett, “German Bank Accused of Genocide,” BBC News, September 25, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1561463.stm. 62 Nobantu Shabangu, “Germany Finally Recognises Namibian Genocide and Offers 1.34 Billion U.S Dollar Development Fund,” Okayafrica, May 28, 2021, www.okayafrica. com/namibian-genocide-recognised-germany-offers-1-34-billion-u-s-dollar-fund/. 63 According to Echtler, “Pissing the Sacred,” 143. 64 Ibid. The Schweitzer quote is taken from Erica Anderson, The World of Albert Schweitzer: A Book of Photographs (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955), 41. 65 Ibid. 66 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London and New York: Verso, 2019), 410. 67 Christoph Schlingensief, dir., Via Intolleranza II (Berlin: Filmgalierie 451, 2010), DVD. 68 The full quote reads: “Es ist der legitime Traum eines Menschen. Aber es ist nicht das, was ich mir unter Kunst vorstelle.” In Barbara Nolte’s interview with Okwui Enwezor, “In München kann man auch überfahren werden,” Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, June 23, 2012, www.pnn.de/kultur/ueberregional/in-muenchen-kann-man-auchueberfahren-werden-okwui-enwezor-erlebte-buergerkrieg-in-nigeria-und-spaeterdie-bronx-in-new-york-warum-er-richard-wagner-schaetzt-und-schlingensiefsoperndorf-nicht-ernst-nimmt/21823978.html. 69 Azoulay, Potential History, 106. 70 Luke Syson and Dora Thornton write: “There was no single word in Italian or Latin in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century that translates unequivocally as ‘artist.’ 174 Epilogue 71 72 73 74 75 Practitioners were almost always precisely defined by their trades: painters, sculptors and goldsmiths, as well as weavers, potters, embroiderers and woodworkers.” Objects of Virtue: Arts in Renaissance Italy (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001), 229. The translation is given by Echtler, “Pissing the Sacred,” 140. Arthur Danto saw Beuys as “the most radical” proponent of those “enfranchising theories” of art sprouting from Duchampian seeds. After the End of Art (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), 184. If art wants to be philosophy, rationalized Hegel, we might as well do it properly as philosophy. The medium that can express the new subject matter of the new man as free “intellectual being,” argued Hegel, cannot be the plastic “human bodily shape” (which can only render the existence of the spirit in material form through sense perception), but “self-conscious inward intelligence,” or in plain words, the discursive thought of philosophy. Hegel read German romanticism both as a proof of unprecedented artistic capacity for abstract ideas and as symptomatic of art’s decline, since the moral and political discursivity of such art renders the true nature of art, its imaginative and sensuous existence, as mere “external and superfluous adornment.” Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 86–7, and 56–7. Richard Wagner wrote that the last “two thousand years” of European civilization since the demise of Greek Tragedy belonged “to Philosophy and not to Art.” Art and Revolution, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Glouchester: Dodo Press), 5. Whereas Hegel, like Winkelmann, worshipped Greek art primarily in its sculptural manifestation, Wagner saw its drama as the only true manifestation of art in human history, and the arts of poetry, rhetoric, sculpture, music, and dance as the dissevered remains “sprung from the wreck of [Greek] Tragedy” that proliferated as mere handmaidens to power and commerce. Ibid., 20–21. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 57.