Christoph Schlingensief's Posthumous German Pavilion at 2011 Venice Biennale

Christoph Schlingensief, who died on August 21, 2010 at age 49, was posthumously selected to represent Germany at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Curator Susanne Gaensheimer maintained the choice despite the impossibility of creating Schlingensief's work without him. Known for unpredictability across film, theater, opera, political happenings, installations, and talk shows, Schlingensief's 2004 Bayreuth Festival production of Parsifal caused scandal with its watchtower, barbed wire, rotting rabbit entrails, African dancer flower-girls, and voodoo priest Klingsor. Tenor Endrik Wottrich raged against the production, while conductor Pierre Boulez defended it. After a 2008 cancer diagnosis, Schlingensief created the Fluxus oratorio "Eine Kirche der Angst vor dem Fremden in mir," a logorrheic book on death, and began constructing an opera village near Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Designed by architect Francis Kéré, the village includes a school, cinema and music classes, cafeteria, offices, restaurant, housing, football field, farmland, theater stage, and festival hall. The German Pavilion's scenography transposes principles of this African utopia, presenting it centrally. Visitors will also see multi-media works including installations and video recordings of performances, with the challenge of not museumifying the artist's disruptive spirit.