Von Käfern und Menschen

Three dead bodies meet underground: Otto, who died in the 4th century while fleeing from the Huns, guardsman Friedrich Wilhelm August Schmitt, who died in battle against Napoleonic troops, and music teacher Barbara Stölzl, who has just died in a cycling accident. Surrounded by lichen, cockroaches and beetles, the three live out their lives as virtual holograms of their past existence: no longer materially participating in life, but only present in the world through remnants, traces and legacies. Their increasingly escalating conflict about how to deal responsibly with memories is supplemented by the inclusion of interviews that the production team conducted with experts on data tracking, storage and transgenerational inheritance. From the humus of civilization, a panorama emerges of an increasingly porous democracy that is facing unimagined challenges as a result of digital storage technologies. Does the idea of a participatory public sphere need to be reformatted in an age that has mechanically abolished forgetting?

Following its successful production of The Oresteia (nominated for the Cologne Theater Prize 2021), the team led by director Kathrin Mayr is once again coming together to follow the traces of human archetypes from the past into a possible future. With a text written especially for the Theater im Bauturm by playwright Clemens Mädge and video clips from interviews with experts, a polyphonic panorama of memory is created that combines topics as diverse as epigenetics, archaeology, provenance research and artificial intelligence - without losing sight of the organizational challenges of being dead.

FOR THE LAST TIME: Saturday, July 06