SPAfrica

Mine your trauma. 

SPAfrica is a solo performance about empathy and extractivism, exploring how closely racism is linked to capitalism through water as conflict material. 

Together with the South African-Swiss performer Ntando Cele and the Utrecht-based musician and producer Frank Wienk, Julian Hetzel creates a hybrid experience combining theatre, music and video, where water and tears serve as metaphors for the extraction of natural and emotional resources.  

The project explores the limits of empathy – the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference. In SPAfrica the discourse on empathy is taken a step further with the goal to reveal problematic mechanics of its working. What if empathy is a practice and an active technology that is not to modify and to work against privilege and power but a tool that reinforces it? 

SPAfrica introduces a sustainable product that is as conflicting as it is clear: drinking water that originates from the sub-Saharan regions and is imported into Europe. SPAfrica – the world’s first ’empathy drink’. An invitation to critically reflect about extractivism and commodity-fetishism.  

In English / duration: 90 minuten