SPAfrica

SPAfrica
Studio Julian Hetzel & Ntando Cele
30. September & 1. October, 7:30 pm | WUK-Saal
30. September: Artist Talk following the performance
Ntando Cele in conversation with Fariba Mosleh, curator and cultural manager.

Tickets on sale from early August – more information coming soon

SPAfrica is a performance about empathy and extractivism—a project that explores the connections between capitalism and racism.

Julian Hetzel and Ntando Cele join forces to examine the limits of empathy: our ability to understand or share another person’s experience. What if empathy does not challenge or dismantle existing power structures, but instead reinforces privilege? SPAfrica exposes the problematic mechanisms and hidden forms of racism embedded within the way empathy operates.

The performance introduces a double gesture of extracting “liquid empathy,” drawing on the exchange of resources between Europe and Africa—water for tears, and tears for water. On the one hand, drinking water from sub-Saharan Africa is imported into Europe as SPAfrica, the world’s first “empathy drink.” On the other, tears are harvested in the heart of Europe and returned to Africa as a source of water. By juxtaposing the extraction of natural and emotional resources, the project reveals the neoliberal logics that drive the search for new forms of raw materials.

In this new work, Hetzel and Cele also question how intangible values such as identity and cultural background become capitalized. Within the international art market, the cultural background and identity of artists and performers have become valuable resources for value creation. Is trauma the new gold of the art world?