A theatre evening in Cape Town
Like every year, I invite friends and colleagues to dinner this year to say goodbye and also to present my work here in South Africa:
Pictures and sculptures I made. The atmosphere is characterized by warmth and affection, but also always new ideas and conversations come up.
This time the Ripley type, the psychopath, was the topic of conversation and the ORF journalist’s episode from last year was quoted again and again:
One year ago, I invited a young ORF journalist who wanted to research art in South Africa, to one of these dinners to introduce her to interesting people. It became a desaster.
Not only was she 2 hours late, she behaved with incredible arrogance, coupled with complete ignorance, insulting everyone present.
Even worse, I completely failed myself, because I was hesitant to correct her, as I didn’t want to get into trouble with her. What a mistake!
Everyone present, except the two of us, were South Africans, she aproached with insulting questions such as
“Who are you?”
“Have you done anything?”
“Is everything here criminal?”
”Is that all, you achieved?”
Today, a year later, this event appears to be a theater play. A normal round of communication is blown up by an intruder. Does a positive conversation always have a negative subtext that breaks through brutally when it finds someone who takes it forward?
Peter Handke staged “offending the audience” and Luis Bunuel let a noble society take hostage themselves in his play “El Angel Exterminador”.
In our efforts to create beauty, to create something worth living, does something always falls short, because it is just an effort?
Sigmund Freud wrote about this antagonism in his 1930 treatise “Civilization and its Discontents”:
In order for us to be able to live together peacefully in ever larger social units, we must increasingly forego the satisfaction of sexual and aggressive drives: “Eros, also known as the life drive, aims to preserve living substance and combine it into larger units. The death drive consists in the urge to break up larger units and return them to an inorganic state.”
Didn’t our play with the ORF journalist enact exactly the same play that Donald Trump plays in the USA and the right-wing extremist parties do in Europe?