HOPE

HOPE

Performance by nebel nebel

"The first person who surrounded a piece of land with a fence and had the idea of saying "This is mine" and who found people simple-minded enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how much misery and horror would the human race have been spared if someone had pulled up stakes and called out to his fellow human beings: "Beware of believing the deceiver; you are lost if you forget that while the fruits belong to everyone, the earth belongs to no one."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "Discourse on Inequality"

City dwellers are taking refuge in allotments, others are annexing entire countries and, around 60 years after the first moon landing, space has once again become a projection surface for power fantasies. What once carried sailing ships across oceans now flies across the endless expanse in rockets: the old idea that everything can be conquered, measured and exploited. But how can we escape a territorial sense of ownership that extends to the stars?

HOPE is a walk-through stage installation with live performance that guides the audience through an animated object theater world as part of a staged tour. Two performers tell a fantastic story about claims of ownership, human hubris and the power of non-human actors. Starting from the moon, HOPE questions the relationship between humans and the environment in a bizarre experimental set-up. The audience bid for their own piece of the moon and become witnesses to an absurd intergalactic legal dispute: Not everything can be fenced off - especially not that which has never belonged to anyone but oneself. The man in the moon becomes reality and is confronted with the consequences of his romantic fantasy. Where does the promise of freedom in the logic of ownership lead us?