Two days ago I discovered that there was a concentration camp from august 1944 till april 1945, very close to the forest where we work. The prisoners came from Mauthausen and were forced to work in the caves of Peggau. Now on the place of where the camp was, there is a memorial for the people who died there. I started to read more about the camp on the internet and for the coming week we meet someone of the village who has the official archive with more information. The road, on which we bike every day to go to the forest is the same road as the prisoners had to run every day to go their work as slaves, hounded by their guards with whips and rifles. The villagers who saw them pass every day were not allowed to make contact with them.

Images of horror entered our minds. The trees have seen it all happening. The molesting, suffering, dying, the power abuse and sadistic acts.

Last night i wrote a text for the performance that deals with us being in a forest so close to such a dark past. How to give respect to the victims of fascism in a performance that wants to attack a wrong idea of masculinity. A power thinking that is based on a separation with the other, generates automatically a repressed society. Fascism, Putin, the Arab world, we see so much examples of this kind of masculine thinking. But i see and experience it also in my own body and mind and in the way I live. And I see it back in how we deal with our environment.

But will people understand this political side of the work when they come to see the show. Or will they see me as an artist, who can’t look further than his own struggle with masculinity and his place in the world in which a certain way of power thinking exclude automatically minorities and abuse automatically the natural resources – let’s say the gifts of mother earth.

It is a little awkward to explain the value of making this kind of work, two weeks before the delivery of the performance. I hope the performance itself won’t need any explanation. The most efficient reality check will be the performance itself.