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A man travels through Africa searching for a suitable place to build an opera house: Christoph Schlingensief. The project, supported by the Goethe-Institut, still poses many questions – and that’s what makes it so interesting.

Maputo in July: Teatro Avenida in the Mozambican capital has a special guest from Germany. Christoph Schlingensief is seated in the auditorium. Here, the director and performance artist is merely a spectator, while on stage, theatre students hold a workshop under the watchful eye of Henning Mankell. Teatro Avenida is the Swedish bestseller author’s dream of a lifetime. He has run it since the mid-1980s and spends most of the year here.

At the beginning of the work, the Swedish students intone an African song they learned especially for the visit. Schlingensief has a dream, as well, that he wishes to realize in Africa: an opera.

Is Schlingensief a new Fitzcarraldo? The comparison comes to mind: someone who is enlivened by an idea, someone who wishes to bequeath an opera to the world – an opera in the middle of Africa, in Burkina Faso, Cameroun or maybe in Mozambique. The artist plans to announce the decision where he will build in a few weeks. He has already openly reported that his heart beats for Burkina Faso.

Schlingensief himself admits to a similarity with Fitzcarraldo, the adventurer immortalized in film by Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski who was driven by the dream of building an opera house in the jungle of Peru. Cameroun was the first stop in the search for the suitable location for Schlingensief’s opera. Afterwards, he wrote “The pinnacle of the arts is by far not enough for Africa.” Even in Bayreuth, he continues, he noticed, “that the opera, and Bayreuth in particular, uses theft and self-appropriation to cover up our disturbed relationship to redemption, which apparently always seems to trigger a kind of group hysteria.” This is a line of argument that is, perhaps, not directly comprehensible to most. Yet, is it a shortcoming? If it were otherwise, it wouldn’t be Schlingensief; unambiguousness is not the artist’s strong suit.

“We will understand it someday”

The vagueness and unexplained nature of his visions certainly can be irritating. “He doesn’t like to be pinned down; to give reasons,” writes Anita Blasberg in the Zeit. The writer describes a scene in her article: at the Goethe-Institut in Ouagadougou Schlingensief explains his plans to a group from the cultural sector – or rather he does not explain it. At the end of his talk, he gazes at friendly, yet perplexed faces. “You’re a big man who believes in what he does,” a theatre owner says, “but what’s exactly your plan?” Schlingensief’s response: “We don’t know yet why we are doing this here, but we will understand it someday.”

The Goethe-Institut has also taken up on the exciting enterprise with its uncertain outcome. With its local infrastructure, it is giving Schlingensief the access he needs to the art scene, policymakers and social institutions. During Schlingensief’s travels Peter Anders, responsible for the cultural programmes of the Goethe-Institut in Sub-Saharan Africa, is always at his side.

The plan to build an opera in Africa is, nonetheless, for Schlingensief not the endeavour of an obsessed man. He has already gained a number of supporters: in addition to the Goethe-Institut, foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, for instance. Rupert Neudeck also wants to help, and Daniel Barenboim and Jürgen Flimm have announced their interest in the project. It is “not an impossible idea,” says Schlingensief, “made only for the market-based profit, but rather the idea to officially rob Africa and, for this purpose, to take along and employ one’s own body as an information carrier, as a photographic plate. So, not some art snob on his Goethean travels wanting to show the Africans what German culture is capable of, but rather a pale European leaf betaking himself to Africa for further illumination.”

The “enhanced idea of an opera”

What will the opera house look like? Schlingensief has already made a few sketches that can be seen on his website. They would be realized by his friend Freund Francis Kéré, an architect from Burkina Faso now living in Berlin. The Goethe-Institut, which already carried out a successful urban planning project in Johannesburg with Kéré, introduced the two to one another.

Accordingly, it would be a festival hall erected from country-specific parts; in addition Schlingensief envisions a rehearsal stage, a boarding house, a caretaker couple, a small infirmary and a kitchen with a cook and a crew to keep hunger at bay.

The house should become a place of dialogue. Here, artists from Africa could come together and work together with artists from the rest of the world. The 49-year-old is talking about the “enhanced idea of an opera,” and of a “long overdue new kind of development aid for Africa, which not only doles out, but also steals, thus sees itself as also a part of the common cycle.” His festival house would liberate the colony of opera from its torpor and grasp it as a living vessel with holes, which takes from its surroundings and gives back to its surroundings.

One person who really understands Schlingensief is Henning Mankell. At the encounter in Maputo, the Swede allows the project to be explained to him in detail and sees many similarities. The “playing back” in dealing with Africa, that is what both artists envision – simply “official robbery.”