The Making Life in the Ruins festival opens at the Sophiensælen on 15 May. The international performance festival is showing a total of ten productions, including six German premieres. In the first week of the festival, works by Tiran Willemse, Basel Zaraa and Paula Almirón will be presented.
Image avobe: © Stanislav Dobak
Making Life in the Ruins brings together contemporary artistic positions from different regions that deal with the tension between the confrontation with outdated concepts and the loss caused by violent events.
The works thematise the confrontation with lost ideas of the future and the past and use these as a starting point for new artistic perspectives. Memories and ideas are combined to create speculative narratives, alternative rituals and archaeological approaches.
In Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3) from 15 May, Tiran Willemse thematises his own dance history, which is composed of elements from the ballet classic Giselle, Kuduro from Angola and the Nigerian genre Alanta.
The installation Dear Laila, on show from 16 May, thematises a destroyed place. In it, Basel Zaraa examines how war and exile influence private and public life.
Brussels-based choreographer Paula Almirón will be presenting a work in Berlin for the first time from 16 May. The River and The Devil deals with the ruins of a former body of water, with mythical figures and fragmented stories.
A workshop on water justice on 18 May with Paula Almirón and Evelyn Linde offers perspectives on local and international questions of water distribution. A historical tour of the building on 17 May will shed light on the history of the building and place its ruins in an artistic context.
The event raises the question of whether ruins can be understood not only as a sign of decline, but also as a starting point for new developments.
Tiran Willemse: Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3)
In Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3), the South African-born, European-based choreographer Tiran Willemse thematises his own dance history, based on elements of the 19th century ballet classic Giselle, Kuduro from Angola and the Nigerian genre Alanta.
The narrative of Giselle serves as a central means by which Willemse addresses various aspects of his own past. Untitled (Nostalgia, Act 3) reflects on Black experiences in European contexts, highlighting social norms and their effects. The performance deals with gender identities and thematises the presence of non-cisnormative bodies in public space.
Basel Zaraa: Dear Laila
The idea for Dear Laila came about when Basel Zaraa’s five-year-old daughter asked him about his childhood home. As it was not possible to travel there, he reconstructed a model of his childhood home in the Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk in Damascus. The work Dear Laila, which has been shown internationally since 2022 and won the ZKB Audience Award 2023, thematises the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance through a family story. It analyses how war and exile affect everyday life, the domestic environment and public space.
Dear Laila is an installation that can be visited by one individual at a time. Through the reproduction of memories and with the help of haptic details and objects, a place that has been destroyed today is depicted.
Paula Almirón: The River and The Devil
According to historical reports, colonial settlers in the Bolivian Altiplano highlands referred to the Desaguadero River as ‘the devil’ during colonial times due to its difficult-to-control nature. After prolonged exploitation, the river has now dried up and is largely salinised. Based on this condition, The River and The Devil explores the history of the river and examines fragmented narratives, mythological figures and traditional spirits that are localised in the region.
With this work, Brussels-based Argentinian choreographer Paula Almirón is presenting a project in Berlin for the first time. She works at the interface between choreography and text and explores the interactions between social, spiritual and geological aspects. Since 2019, one focus of her work has been on so-called ‘water choreographies’. In The River and The Devil, she combines dance, visual art, sound and collaborative storytelling to create an artistic exploration of the themes of loss and resistance.
Historical House Tour
As part of the Making Life in the Ruins festival, Sophiensæle is offering a historical tour of the building, during which visitors can explore the structural and historical traces of the building. The building, in which the Sophiensæle was founded in 1996 as a theatre initiative, looks back on a diverse history of use that reflects various stages of German history. Among other things, it served as a clubhouse for the Berlin Craftsmen’s Association in the early 20th century, as a meeting place for the labour movement, as a place of forced labour during National Socialism and later as a theatre workshop in the GDR. The guided tour provides insights into these historical layers of use and invites visitors to reflect on their significance for today’s discourses and to engage with the past. The tour concludes with a discussion of which elements of this history could be relevant for a common future.
WHEN?
Festival opening: Thursday, 15 May 2025
Festival dates: Thursday, 15 May – Saturday, 31 May 2025
WHERE?
Sophiensæle
Sophienstraße 18
10178 Berlin
