“This madness must stop” – Kay Sara and Milo Rau open the Wiener Festwochen & start the “School of Resistance“
„Don‘t wait to have your big revolving stages and your 500 actors in fatsuits back,“ Milo Rau told the New York Times last week in a text on the role of the theater during and after Corona. “The theatre can create forms of solidarity and community parallel to capitalist exploitation,” the Swiss director said in a film by the German television about his work. In the Italian Repubblica he specified: “We must really think this crisis and translate it into a new, democratic way of making art”.
But how can we shape the future without falling into old, destructive patterns? In numerous livestream conversations with, among others, the globalization critic Jean Ziegler, the Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat, the New York Segal Center or the Italian activist Lorenzo Marsili, Rau and his colleagues have been sketching out ideas for an activist art in recent weeks. Starting from this and from earlier contacts and networks, a think tank has emerged, a platform for experts of change: the School of Resistance. Together with NTGent, the Academy of Arts (Germany), medico international, the Berlin based Merve-Verlag and with the support of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the IIPM will be exploring the question of a sustainable future in a two-week debate format with artists, activists and politicians from all over the world.
The first episode “This madness must stop” will be broadcasted live this Saturday, 16 May, 6:00 p.m. (CET) and will also be the digital stage for the official opening of the Wiener Festwochen. The evening will start with a militant speech by the indigenous Amazonian activist and actress Kay Sara (Brazil). Her speech is followed by a discussion with the artist Tania Bruguera (Cuba) and Milo Rau, moderated by the Dutch curator Lara Staal.
All information about the event and the participants can be downloaded here. You can follow the stream on the Facebook pages of IIPM or NTGent, on the pages of our partners or here.
After the first episode on the occasion of the opening of the Wiener Festwochen, the School of Resistance takes place every two weeks on Thursday. Next date: 28 May, 17:00 (CET), guests: Vandana Shiva (climate activist, India) and Vanessa Nakate (Fridays for Future, Uganda).