Diamante. Die Geschichte einer Free Private City

Diamante is a special place: a privately-owned town belonging to a company of the kind that only exists in Latin America. Red-painted wooden houses in the Scandinavian style huddle together closely in the middle of the jungle in Misiones. It was built well over 100 years ago in northern Argentina by the German industrialist Emil Hügel to house the workers for his coal and steel company Goodwind.

Filmmaker, theatremaker and writer Mariano Pensotti, born in Buenos Aires in 1973, always directs his own texts. For the Ruhrtriennale he will build a walk-through model of Diamante in the Kraftzentrale in Duisburg. Here we will experience together with the inhabitants – played by a cast of Argentinian and German performers – how the town is transformed over the course of a year from a flourishing social-capitalist utopia into a what appears to be a pre-apocalyptic horror scenario: communal physical exercises every morning and communal music-making every evening give way to violent robberies and fear of the other people living in the surrounding Argentinian villages. Proud factory workers turn into insecure service providers. Now Diamante is like a jungle version of Silicon Valley.