Two years after the Focus devoted to them at the Festival d’Automne, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg conjure up an open-ended world populated by avatars. By means of identical faces and pre-recorded voices, the same traumatic memories are played out over and over again.
In line with her previous production Einstein on the Beach, the German director leads us headlong into the confines of an imaginary world-work. Resembling a virtual simulation of some kind, this is a space in which all linear paths have been abolished and which does away with the frontal nature of theatre. Stuck in this infernal loop, the audience navigates a path between the dislocated fragments of Xenia’s memory and, in doing so, examines the existential anxieties that have led to her death. Tinged with irony of a macabre kind, Susanne Kennedy turns this antechamber of death into a place where conventional discourses about our finitude resonate. She distances herself from the anxieties of the world of contemporary art and its different mechanisms, but also from her own work. Behind the fake retrospective of this character lies a journey deep into the collaborative work of Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg. The Work takes on the form of a living archive, a self-portrait for two voices in which each scenographic element reactivates the various obsessions and aesthetics that punctuate their work as a duo.