When Christoph Schlingensief came along and said he was building an opera village in Africa, everyone thought he was crazy. The artist, then less than 50 years old, was already suffering from lung cancer when he traveled across the continent, exhausted but undeterred. After Cameroon and Mozambique, he ended up in Burkina Faso. The Minister of Culture personally drove him around the country, showing him the barren plains and untouched lands, although, as he later admitted, he had not understood for a long time what Schlingensief was actually planning.
“He came like a shooting star,” recalls Motandi Ouoba, the opera village director, today – 15 years later. Even in the most remote villages people talked about crazy Germans who could say things that others would not even dare to think. In Germany, Schlingensief has long been considered a professional Dadaist provocateur. At the latest when he called on four million unemployed people to swim together in Lake Wolfgang to flood Helmut Kohl’s holiday home, or wrote on his party’s “Chance 2000” election poster: “Kill Jürgen Möllemann!” – a deliberate breaking of taboos against the burgeoning right-wing populism.
When Schlingensief was invited to Bayreuth in 2004, it was more than just an honor for the son of a citizen and a perennial outsider. With the visually powerful “Parsifal,” he suddenly found himself in the deepest sanctuaries of German high culture, in a system he had previously so masterfully disrupted. But the closer he got to the center, the tighter it became. Cancer did the rest: Bayreuth, he said later, was “a burial chamber”. Schlingensief wants out.
Schlingensief’s concept of opera was always larger than the stage
The Opera Village in Burkina Faso is a radical replica – not a European cultural export, but a living place where learning should be an art form and art should be part of everyday life. It doesn’t matter that almost no one here knows about Wagner or Mozart. On the contrary: Schlingensief’s concept of opera was always larger than the stage – a work of social art in which language, sound, movement and community can merge into a living whole.
The artist found what he was looking for in Laongo, an hour’s drive northeast of Ouagadougou. A strangely serene place with jagged rock formations growing out of its glowing red soil. In between, acacia trees spread their umbrellas. Far from the noise of the capital city, where dust covers life like a veil. The landscape looks ancient and untouched at the same time. And there is a hill. Like in Bayreuth.
15 years later there is still no opera house in Laongo. But something has developed: a school with 300 children in four classes, half of them girls, a garden where cabbages, eggplants and tomatoes grow, a hospital with a maternity ward, workshops, houses made of red flint.
“A lot of people say: That’s it.”
The film and theater maker died in February 2010, six months after the foundation stone was laid. “A lot of people said: That’s it. We already know,” recalls Motandi Ouoba. But that’s not the end. Thanks especially to Aino Laberenz, Schlingensief’s widow, who now runs the opera village.
The costume designer turned what should have been an obsessive theater fever dream into a long-term and viable project. With clear vision and great tenacity, he created structures where previously only vision existed. “Opera Village is not an installation, but something that was designed to be a reality from the start,” he said. This means: budget plans, contracts, wages, bureaucracy. This requires management and perseverance, sensitivity to political trends and, the usual: money. In other words, the heavy things that Christoph Schlingensief likes to discuss in his work.
He is still supported today by the architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, a close confidant who has become one of the most famous architects of our time since the German pavilion at the 2021 Venice Biennale. In the opera village, Kéré designed architecture that seems to emerge from the landscape like a spiral – with a deliberately unfinished center.
Already erected buildings made of clay bricks and corrugated iron roofs lie snail-like around the square where the festival hall will one day stand. Kéré does not develop across regions, but together – locally, smartly and climate-consciously. A passive ventilation system prevents intense heat without the need for air conditioning.
Pictures from Africa, not about Africa
Children cover a distance of up to eight kilometers and then spend their days here from 07.30 to 17.00, including Saturdays. Apart from arithmetic and writing, the curriculum includes dance, theatre, painting, music and film. During the holidays we make pottery, paint and cook together. Every child gets a hot meal – for many children, this is the only thing that happens in the day. The ongoing operation of the opera village costs around 120,000 euros per year, most of which is raised through donations. The Burkinabe state pays teachers and medical staff. But everything beyond that – art teachers, dentists, school meals and wage subsidies – is the responsibility of this project.
Children learn to express themselves, develop ideas and appear confident. Seeing art as a place where they can dream and create different realities. There are sound and film studios, a small stage for your own productions, and walls for painting. “They are much brighter than other schools,” said teacher Asséta Sawadogo. “It’s not about making them artists. It’s about teaching them to see the world through a different point of view.” Art here is not understood as decoration, but as a social practice, as a means of orientation, self-confidence, togetherness.
From the start, Schlingensief’s goal was an artistic outpost that produced images – not of Africa, but of Africa. “Burkina Faso is a poor country, but culturally very rich,” said Aino Laberenz. Ouagadougou has long been a magnet for creatives from across Africa, with the continent’s largest film festival and a vibrant contemporary theater scene. “Art is not something you take with you, it is a part of life.”
In 2022 the military launched a coup in Burkina Faso
But the country where Christoph Schlingensief once came has changed. In the north, armed groups terrorize the population, and military officer Ibrahim Traoré has ruled harshly since a 2022 coup. Many young citizens celebrate him as a symbol of a confident African revival. This was accompanied by anti-Western rhetoric and a conscious break with old dependencies. The Goethe Institute in Ouagadougou, an important partner of the opera village, is the last remaining European cultural institution in the Sahel and is increasingly caught between the vanguard.
The opera village is also feeling the changes. The residency program, which was launched in 2015 and was intended to bring together artists, theater makers and intellectuals from Africa and Europe, is now taking place without European participation – for security reasons. “Of course this is also related to our history,” said Aino Laberenz. “West Africa is starting to come to terms with its colonial past, which is important and right. And we have to accept that we are not the focus.”
Opera Village’s residency program is curated by British-Nigerian photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi, who has followed the African diaspora closely for decades. For this year, he invited, among others, the Nigerian artist Christopher Nelson Obuh, who dedicated himself to the CFA franc, the currency of many West African countries tied to France and still a symbol of economic dependence today. Leila Bencharnia from Morocco discusses the colonial history of cotton, Burkina Faso’s most important export, and weaves a piece of cloth with women based on their stories.
Opera Village was Christoph Schlingensief’s last major project – and perhaps his most radical. There are no European cultural exports masquerading as well-meaning development aid, no monuments in our own name, no colonial tales of white men bringing works of art to the poor people of Africa. Instead, Schlingensief sees this project as an attempt to break the existing image, especially the one the West has of Africa: a region of eternal crisis, a house of poverty.
“Development aid” has become a toxic term for artists: too condescending, too patronizing. He sees himself not as a giver, but as a receiver – through the strength, spirituality and depth of the cultures he encounters. In his mind, the opera village was not a finished work, but, to paraphrase Beuys, a social sculpture: a growing organism, open to what was to come. “I think the energy he had lives in a lot of people,” Motandi Ouoba said. “With people who believe in what he started.”
