Matthias Glaubrecht und Lukas Bärfuss, Natur und Traurigkeit
Matthias Glaubrecht und Lukas Bärfuss, Natur und Traurigkeit | © Caroline Seidel, Ruhrtriennale 2023

Our series about »human nature« continues in Year Three and we examine its title in two senses: what is the nature of human beings? But what do humans understand »nature« to be?

About the production

Mankind, Robert Burton writes in his monumental book on melancholy, is the sovereign master of the world, yet at the same time, he lives a life of misery, lower than all the animals, plagued by dark thoughts, by a death urge. One can also see this differently, as George Steiner did. Sadness is a pre-requisite of thinking and therefore also of humanity. Reason and critique require a consciousness that understands the distinction and attempts to remove them in a single thought.  Indispensable as a metaphor and an idea, sadness sometimes ends fatally. Depression is the scourge of humanity, a life-threatening and widespread disease, described and lamented by the literature of all ages and all continents. It leads to individuality, to Hamlet, and to the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares. And sometimes, for example in a young woman by the name of Antigone, sadness becomes political. Can they share and organize sadness, can it assemble and unite us as a society?

Der Beginn des Denkens und der Politik ist die Trauer – nicht die Wut. Trauer reflektiert, wer trauert, ist empfindlich für falsche Töne. Denken beinhaltet immer die Traurigkeit; wir haben uns mit der eigenen Endlichkeit auseinanderzusetzen, mit dem Verlust, der Regression. Eine humane Gesellschaft braucht eine Trauerkultur. Lukas Bärfuss im Interview mit der Rheinischen Post

Sun 10 September 2023

5 pm Dialogue
Lukas Bärfuss in conversation with the zoologist and science journalist Matthias Glaubrecht, winner of the Siegmund Freud Prize 2023 (author of Das Ende der Evolution)

7.30 pm Reading
with: Wiebke Puls
with texts by: John Millington Synge, José Eustacio Rivera, Gertrud Kolamr, Georg Trakl, Judith Schalansky, Gottfried Keller, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller, Adelbert von Chamisso, Edgar Allan Poe, Karoline von Günderode
Music: Sachiko Hara und Carl Oesterhelt

Talking to Lukas Bärfuss

Matthias Glaubrecht and Lukas Bärfuss, Natur und Traurigkeit
Matthias Glaubrecht and Lukas Bärfuss, Natur und Traurigkeit | © Caroline Seidel, Ruhrtriennale 2023
Matthias Glaubrecht und Lukas Bärfuss, Natur und Traurigkeit
Matthias Glaubrecht und Lukas Bärfuss, Natur und Traurigkeit | © Caroline Seidel, Ruhrtriennale 2023
Matthias Glaubrecht and Lukas Bärfuss, Natur und Traurigkeit
Matthias Glaubrecht and Lukas Bärfuss, Natur und Traurigkeit | © Caroline Seidel, Ruhrtriennale 2023
Sachiko Hara, Natur und Traurigkeit
Sachiko Hara, Natur und Traurigkeit | © Caroline Seidel, Ruhrtriennale 2023
Sachiko Hara, Wiebke Puls and Carl Oesterhelt, Natur und Traurigkeit
Sachiko Hara, Wiebke Puls and Carl Oesterhelt, Natur und Traurigkeit | © Caroline Seidel, Ruhrtriennale 2023
Wiebke Puls, Natur und Traurigkeit
Wiebke Puls, Natur und Traurigkeit | © Caroline Seidel, Ruhrtriennale 2023

Ruhrtriennale dramaturge Judith Gerstenberg met the writer Lukas Bärfuss in Zurich and spoke with him about the focus of this year's events and the invited guests.

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