Roden, Daniel Kötter

In the organizer's words:

Europe is deforested. The timber crisis of the 19th century left the European population reaching for the underground forests of carbon, pushing the boundaries of capitalist expansion into the air, soil, geology and societies in the so-called global south. 200 years later, the partially recultivated spruce and mixed forests have also disappeared - rising temperatures and drought made the spruce susceptible to the bark beetle and turned once familiar landscapes into a question mark. The future of the forest in the context of climate change and political upheaval presents us with different tasks this time.

"Roden" takes place in the midst of this new landscape change and questions the idea of resilience - the ability to react to a disturbance. Together with women's rights activist Olande Byamungu, instrument maker and musician Ikbal Lubys and carpenter and performer Wolfram Sander, documentary filmmaker and theater director Daniel Kötter offers a cinematic course and a theatrical forest in which the catastrophe has already taken place.

The play literally takes the audience on a tour through another world that has emerged from the violence against people and forest ecosystems. Who will we meet there? How long will this last? What is possible here? In this documentary project, cinematographic and theatrical experience merge and create friction between the "theatrical here and now" and other temporalities: those of the biological life of forests, plantations, local forestry, carbon cycles and life in the soil.

"Roden" is a performance that was developed as part of the Roden / Kukata Miti / Pembalakan project. It follows on from Daniel Kötter's series of performances and 360° films "landscapes and bodies", which investigated the effects of extractivism on landscapes and communities in Indonesia, the DR Congo and Germany between 2018 and 2022.