Der Auftrag / Psyche 17 von Heiner Müller / Elemawusi Agbédjidji

With a secret mission, the French Revolution is to be extended to the slave-owning colony of Jamaica. Three emissaries are on their way there to throw liberty, equality and fraternity into the world as an "incendiary torch of freedom". But the export of European values fails.

In 1980, the great East German author Heiner Müller did poetic mourning work by writing the commission and showed the failure of a utopia. And today? The European sense of mission has been severely tarnished, but nevertheless - for example in West Africa - there is no end to it. Which missions can really be used to develop a just, shared future?

Where Heiner Müller ends in a grand, metaphorical declaration of bankruptcy, Jan-Christoph Gockel, who has been working with artists from the African continent for many years, will seek an approach for a new narrative together with the Togolese author Elemawusi Agbédjidji. 43 years after Müller, Agbédjidji writes a contemporary commentary on his man in the elevator, who holds a dreamlike monologue as an enigmatic insert in the commission . Agbédjidji asks himself how the elevator left behind, an old technology that helped to manifest hierarchies, can be used in the future.