From Bayreuth to Burkina Faso

<p><i></i><b>The postcolonial <i>Gesamtkunstwerk</i>: Disrupting the Eurocentric perspective on art history and addressing Germany’s colonial history </b><i></i></p><p><i>Opera Village Africa</i>, a participatory art experiment by the late German multimedia artist Christoph Schlingensief, serves as a testing ground for a critical interrogation of Richard Wagner’s notion of the <i>Gesamtkunstwerk</i>. Sarah Hegenbart traces the path from Wagner’s introduction of the <i>Gesamtkunstwerk</i> in Bayreuth to Schlingensief’s attempt to charge the idea of the total artwork with new meaning by transposing it to the West African country Burkina Faso. Schlingensief developed O<i>pera Village</i> in collaboration with the world-renowned architect Francis Kéré. This final project of Schlingensief is inspired by and illuminates the diverse themes that informed his artistic practice, including coming to terms with the German past, anti-Semitism, critical race theory, and questions of postcolonial (self-)criticism.</p><p><i>From Bayreuth to Burkina Faso</i> introduces the notion of the postcolonial <i>Gesamtkunstwerk</i> to disrupt the Eurocentric perspective on art history, exploring how the socio-political force of a postcolonial <i>Gesamtkunstwerk</i> 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.</p><p>This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).</p>