Am Anfang

Take the red cape

take the universe

and go naked

Hamadoun Kassogué, Bamako, 2019

In my project IN THE BEGINNING I question religious creation myths from West Africa and Europe as well as scientific stories about the creation of the world. For this purpose I confront traditional and religious music from Mali with contemporary European music. The narrative instrument consists of singing, performance and video art. AM ANFERST brings together the Djiguiya Orchestra from Bamako with the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the international Marc Sinan Company.

In 150 fragments I process musical, poetic, religious and scientific documents of reality, initially in a room installation, later digitally and finally as a hybrid performance the different perspectives in one of 581122465820059646021274559423679879020508361564998356485043500

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The project AM ANFANG reflects the experience that the world is contradictory and thus also the description(s) of world. Although we are aware of the simultaneity of different perspectives on our existence, we are still indifferent to our own existences, to our own worlds, each with our own perspective on them.

Interestingly, the narratives about the beginning of everything are fundamentally different: Some believe that God created the world. Others believe in the scientific theory of the Big Bang. The Dogon people of Westmali pass on the myth of a fraternal twin impatiently fleeing from the womb, with a piece of the placenta falling off, leading to the creation of the earth.

The Dogon have also had astronomical knowledge about the invisible companion of the Sirius star and its trajectory since time immemorial. The existence of this star could only be confirmed by astrophysics at the end of the 20th century.

The project AT THE BEGINNING should make clear that our knowledge only ever enables us to have apparent certainties, with the help of which we can distinguish ourselves from the “others”. But in truth, every certainty is just one more proof of the limitations of all human perception and insight. We are one in the knowledge that every view of the world represents only a singular, anthropocentric fragment of reality. That which is real is greater.

For the performance at the festival DIE IRRITIERTE STADT, a twelve-meter hexagon will form a mythical space where the audience can experience how the creation stories of the Dogon and the Peulh are sung about simultaneously, contrasted by scientific views of the creation story.

A project of the Marc Sinan Company, the Neue Vocalsolisten and the Humboldtforum Berlin

Supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.