Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir A Fluxus Oratorium by Christoph Schlingensief

A wake-up experience without deliverence. Waking from sleep with a start and feeling that an intruder has broken into one’s house.  Waking from a nightmare and realising that one was not asleep. Security has been stolen, it gets hot, it gets cold.  One is not alone in one’s body, something unknown has implanted itself there. The feeling that one no longer feels, a mouldy state, perhaps even a distortion. A pain that is even more painful simply because one has imagined it.  Holes are ripped, memories lost.  Everything is here, nothing is now. One is robbed of oneself and is left an empty monstrance.

The artist Christoph Schlinseif has looked into the sudden intrusion of reality. His Fluxus Oratorium turns presumptions on their head: victims become activists, the hunted become hunters. As comprehension no longer serves, the stranger becomes friend and the trusted becomes a rival.

Fear is the stone with which Schlingensief builds his church. » The fear in me is the fear before me,« he wrote in his notes on a journey at the end of which, whether temporary or far away, no one was waiting for him apart from himself.  The way to the altar is not down the nave, it is into the catacombs and up on the bell-tower and into the confessional – and repeatedly in an Oratorium, the side chapel. » My God, what have you abandoned me? Why have I abandoned me, my God?«

Christoph Schlingensief will fashion a church out of the Gebläsehalle at the Landschaftspark Duisbourg-Nord and reform in an action his Church of Fear, which was originally created in 2003. One of his theses: »A church of fear before the fear in me is a one-person church where we all meet each other.«

With musicians, performers and fear specialists from different cultures, Schlingensief will develop images, litanies and rituals that will track down the intruder and make acquaintance with the stranger who is oneself.

Link to Webseite Eine Kirche der Angst by Christoph Schlingensief.