Scherbengericht über Buddha 2018
Ostracism of Buddha
The famous tale of the outings of the prince Gotama. Or Vipassi. The first outing shows him, who has so far lived in an artificially pretty world, an old man and he realizes: my youth will not endure. The second outing shows him a sick man and he realizes: my health is not mine. The third outing shows him a dead man and he feels what it means to not be anymore, one day.
If all this isn't "my own", as he says, what then is?
On his fourth outing, he meets a man who lives differently than seems to be the norm. He calls himself a waif. He has no home, because he is searching, because he want to live in peace, wants to do no one harm, and wants to feel with all that is living. So, Gotama, or Vipassi, commits to this life without home.
My version of the narrative as told by Hermann Oldenberg (Reden des Buddha, München:Wolff 1922, Nr. 3) is the basis for a sequence of attempts to speak this text today, to probe it, and to put it into different constellations.
Ostracism of Buddha in Jeju (Autumn 2018)
The text, which deals with the human existence, is transported into a space that covers a different reality of human existence. The topic is not a natural death but a violent death; the mass murder of humans (in their majority women and children) by humans (always men) as part of political events. 70 years ago, on Jeju, several thousands of civilians were killed by Korean soldiers. In Europe, just a few years earlier, millions of civilians were killed by Germans in the camps. One of the prisoners there, Jean Améry, placed this experience in his book "Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne" [beyond crime and punishment] in the context of a perpetual history of violence, oppression, contempt, and annihilation: "The Greek civilisation had been built on slavery, and an Attic army had ravaged Melos like the SS had Ukraine." Beside this sentence stands a testimony about the killings on Jeju: "The victims of this execution were: Hyeon Gyeong-ho, Kim Won-jung, Bae Du-bong, Lee Sang-hui, Hyeon Du-hwang, and one person whose name is unknown." (Jeju 4·3 Incident Investigation Report, p. 474)
Performance at the 1st Jeju Contemporary Music Festival 9. October 2018 (Korea)