From Bayreuth to Burkina Faso: Christoph Schlingensief's Opera Village Africa as Postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk?

The postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk: Disrupting the Eurocentric perspective on art history and addressing Germany's colonial history  

Opera Village Africa, a participatory art experiment by the late German multimediaartist Christoph Schlingensief, serves as a testing ground for a criticalinterrogation of Richard Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk. SarahHegenbart traces the path from Wagner's introduction of the Gesamtkunstwerkin Bayreuth to Schlingensief's attempt to charge the idea of the total artworkwith new meaning by transposing it to the West African country Burkina Faso.Schlingensief developed Opera Village in collaboration with theworld-renowned architect Francis Kéré. This final project of Schlingensief isinspired by and illuminates the diverse themes that informed his artisticpractice, including coming to terms with the German past, anti-Semitism,critical race theory, and questions of postcolonial (self-)criticism.

From Bayreuth to Burkina Faso introduces the notion of the postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk to disrupt the Eurocentric perspective on art history, exploring how the socio-political force of a postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk could affect processes of transcultural identity construction. It reveals how Schlingensief translocated the Wagnerian concept to Burkina Faso to address German colonial history and engage with it from the perspective of multidirectional memory cultures.