Kristina Lindquist: When will we start talking about genocide in Gaza?
You know that you are at theater threesome when a performance begins with a regular intercourse on stage – and then switches up. In Florentina Holzinger’s « Sancta », which this week was played in German Volksbühne, a piece of meat from an actor is cut and then fry in oil and eaten during a staging of the last meal.
Judging from the audience rush, it is a « cool » performing arts – to link to the current theater debate. « Sancta » is a beautiful and charming opera, but hardly particularly shaking. The power of the habit is strong when it comes to shock effects and disgust.
Provoked seriously becomes Instead, for a low -key hour where the audience is offered coffee in the wonderful funk building Haus der Berliner Festspiele. « Almost There » is a hearing from Jerusalem by the Israeli performance artist Nobar Sela, where we can accompany her home, consider the tree outside her window, share a coffee and approach each other. Can we meet, after all?
Sela knows how what she calls the war settles in the way of all human relationships. She thinks of her three -year -old, who was redeemed by a Palestinian doctor from Hebron, and hesitates to have a second child. When is it time to take the family and pull? In a notebook on the table in front of us, we can see the thoughts buzzing in her head. It is about jobs, creation and everyday life – and about the dead children. Children in general.
« Almost there » is namely an appeal to the universal man. What is the bottom in you is the bottom in me. As a superior principle, this is the only decent attitude – so why does the whole work feel so skewed?
The premise is that there is an abyss between us to bridge, but it is clear that the artist is aimed at an audience that in many ways already shares her conditions. That has a window to look like through. Which has coffee cups. That has the choice to protect their children. Who does not stand and digs small bodies out of the gravel.
It also becomes clear That the general is sometimes more cheerful than the specific. Encompasses less. « All Lives Matter » says only those who have problems with black lives actually have value. Anyone who speaks beautifully about children in general, but tiger about how children in Gaza are currently murdered in a deliberately arranged famine disaster devotes themselves to laying out dim curtains. In fact, say nothing.
It seems to be a popular line. In Sweden refuses the Foreign Minister to respond to If she thinks Israel is violating international law. It is not her task. « The inability to recognize the reality of Gaza, to call things by its proper name, is so studied that I perceive it as a crime, » As Karin Pettersson writes in Aftonbladet (9/5).
Israel’s safety cabinet Approved this week the plans for a « conquest » by Gaza, the country’s finance minister says Gaza should be « destroyed » and Netanyahu has in the days announced that one will go in « With full force ».
The children, the children, the childrenNobar Sela says in my headphones in Berlin. But there are no general children, and no general rights. There are real, specific children – and in Gaza they are currently in a death camp. But even asserting the existence of Palestinian children seems to be something a provocation in the Swedish public.
VLT’s Lisa Bjurwald tweets If How tired she is on Saturday’s « Palestine spectacle », and is supported by Kristianstadsbladet’s Sofia Nerbrand who believes that the demonstrations Neither evokes « sympathy or respect in sensible persons » (10/5).
Anyone who wants to conduct public opinion against Palestinians being murdered simply may downplay the spectacle a bit. Sure it is sad with twelve -year -olds who weigh twelve kilos, but have you tested being a liberal leader writer while a genocide is going on?
Genocide? What genocide? Returned when everyone is gone.
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