Merge / Buzzing Bridge
The music theater MERGE plays with how the process of recording makes us who we are – how real and fictive record buttons, repetition, sounds, music, and language create our identities.
In a photograph from 1906, a crowd in southern Rwanda gathers for a magical event in front of a small apparatus on a table. Behind the table is an official of the German colonial administration with a machine that sucks in the sound, carves the voices and the music into the wax rollers. The artists offer their talent without compensation.In MERGE, the musicians and performers become sound carriers who turn the stage into a sounding negotiation space: Who owns what and what belongs where? What is foreign? What is the own?