ArchiveApril 2011 Life
The grand bluff
Art exhibition or art fair? Siriki Ky’s installation “L’Afrique Face à son Destin” was also displayed at the Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres.
The Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres: poorly organized and politically compromised – By Daniela Roth
In Africa, desire for Western recognition is great. Last year, South Africa hosted the World Cup for the first time on the African continent. Also in 2010, 17 African states celebrated the 50th anniversary of their independence from colonialism. That same year, a major art event, the Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, was to take place.
Two memorable African cultural events provided examples: The Festac ’77 in Lagos and the first Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar in 1966, which had a fundamental “black consciousness” as its theme. Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor turned the event into a push for “négritude,” his philosophy of African identity. French writer and culture minister, André Malraux, spoke as the guest of honor. Philosopher Alioune Diop was artistic director of the festival, and hosted an illustrious pageant of prominent guests: historian Cheikh Anta Diop, singer-dancer Josephine Baker, a capoeira troupe from Bahia led by Mestre Pastinha, jazz legend Duke Ellington, Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka and many others. And, in a first for the continent, the new Musée Dynamique displayed traditional craftsmanships as African art.
An Opera Village in the African savannah
Christoph Schlingensief dedicated the last year of his life to an ambitious project in Burkina Faso – By Melanie Sevcenko
When German artist Christoph Schlingensief died last August, he didn’t just leave behind a body of controversial work that quenched the thirst for the surreal and absurd, but also his most visionary undertaking to date: Operndorf Afrika, or the African Opera Village.
“I want to finally be able to give money to something without receiving anything in return,” Schlingensief once said. “I want to learn something from Africa.”
Based in Burkina Faso, 30 kilometers northeast of the capital Ouagadougou, the ambitious community-based project is developing and constructing work and living space. It facilitates education, the arts, athletics as well as office and living space and guesthouses, rehearsal space, a restaurant and even a medical station, centered around the opera theater, all within a 14-hectare area in one of the poorest countries of the world.
Counting sheep
Increasingly fewer young people are choosing to work as a shepherd these days – Verena Jahnke is one of them – By Matthias Pankau
It’s 9.30 a.m. in Eimke, a sleepy village with a population of around 350 that lies between Hamburg and Hanover. Verena Jahnke is sitting with her parents at the kitchen table. She makes herself a piece of toast with jam, and a cup of hot chocolate. No one is in the mood to talk much. The family has been up and about since 6 a.m. Jahnke has already cleaned out the stables and fed the animals – rabbits, chickens, goats, sheep and horses. Now it’s her turn to have breakfast. “If I’ve already done some work, then it just tastes better,” she says.
The 20-year-old is training as a shepherd on her parents’ farm. This makes her a member of a dwindling group. According to statistics from the German Shepherds’ Association (VDL), there are currently 29 young men and women in their first year of training in the entire country, and around 2,000 professional shepherds. Their number has fallen by 20 percent over the past five years alone.
Serene in the face of death
The graves of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel will soon receive a makeover.
The poet and playwright Heinrich von Kleist took his life 200 years ago. His grave on the southern outskirts of Berlin is finally getting a makeover – By Klaus Grimberg
The tall trees sway quietly in the gentle spring breeze. The meandering path winds its way past shrubs and bushes up to a slight incline. From here, there’s a view down onto the Kleiner Wannsee lake, its waters lapping indolently against the bank. An eerie silence hangs over the narrow strip of parkland on this chilly March morning. This was where it is thought to have happened.
A place of beauty and despair
The famous prison memorial is reason enough to visit Bautzen. Yet there is much more to see in this town – By Lisa Ellis
It is unusual to be in a town that is defined both by beauty and despair yet Bautzen in eastern Germany is such a place. Attractive and elegant, Bautzen is a mosaic of historical buildings linked by cobbled streets and meandering alleys. Its spires and towers stand tall and proud. It has been exquisitely restored. It is picturesque, even fairytale-like. Yet, like a story by the Brothers Grimm, Bautzen also has a dark side.
For years the town was the site of communist East Germany’s most feared prison, Bautzen11. The connection between the place and the jail is so strong that the very word “Bautzen” has become a synonym – not for the town and its quaint historical center – but for the prison and the cruel punishment meted out to political dissidents in the former East Germany.
The faces of Heinefeld
The Sinti studies from Heinefeld also flowed into Otto Pankok’s “Passion.”
The works of artist Otto Pankok document German Sinti life in the Weimar era – By Robert Rigney
That Germany once had Gypsy settlements on the fringes of its cities, comparable to the squalid “mahalas” common in the Balkans, is something most people don’t really remember. So it comes as something of a surprise to see Otto Pankok’s Weimar era expressionist woodcuts and charcoal drawings of Sinti encampments and their inhabitants on the outskirts of Düsseldorf.
Pankok is hardly a household name in Germany. Unlike German Expressionist artist Otto Mueller, called “Zigeuner Mueller,” who also used the German Sinti as his subjects, Pankok never rose to great postwar fame. Nor do his works fetch comparable prices at art auctions. And yet among European Sinti, Pankok is well known.