1000 Serpentinen Angst

"What I would give to meet my grandmother and my mother at an impossible time, when we would all be 15 years old."

Olivia Wenzel's novel 1000 Serpentines of Fear revolves around the life of a young Black woman born in the GDR. Her travels take her - in leaps between times, places and generations - to Vietnam, Berlin, Morocco, the USA, Poland and Thuringia. How much actually fits into a single life? And how can you talk about everything that defines and shapes you - while you are still in the middle of it all? From the line-loyal grandmother in the GDR to the mother who rebelled against the system as a punk to life in Berlin today, we travel through the stories of a family and jump from place to place, from story to story, from picture to picture, like leafing through an old photo album - except that the language of the pictures is used completely differently and the pictures are never completely familiar. Or as John Berger is quoted in the novel: "All photographs are a kind of journey and an expression of absence." Director Anta Helena Recke, who is adapting a novel for the stage for the first time after her black copy of the production Mittelreich and the production Die Kränkungen der Menschheit, uses her work to make experiences visible that cannot be achieved through language alone. She creates images that tell of what life is like when it is not viewed through curricula vitae or official data, but through the exchange between familiar people, with one's own family, oneself and one's own history.