The Abyss, Davide Enia
TD Berlin, Germany
"If you have three people drowning in front of you and five metres away a mother and her child are sinking, what do you do? Where do you go? What are you supposed to do? Who do you save first if they all go down at the same time?"
In his novel "Shipwreck off Lampedusa", Davide Enia describes the events on the Italian Mediterranean island from a multi-perspective angle. For more than 20 years, but at the latest since the tragic shipwreck of 3rd October 2015, this island has become a symbol for the crisis of sea rescue at the European external borders and thus also a place of fate for refugees, rescuers, helpers and the people living there.
The theatrical adaptation of the novel attempts to depict these perspectives and make them tangible in their very concrete individuality. It is one of the special achievements of Enia's text that it presents the different human fates and experiences on an equal footing - be it those of the refugees, the sea rescuers or those of the author and his family themselves.
Davide Enia describes the encounters and interviews he conducted on Lampedusa with witnesses and participants of the events without attempting to generalise or objectify, and furthermore reflects the permanently progressing catastrophe, which to a large extent takes place beyond our awareness, through his own family history. Through this very personal approach, the author succeeds in portraying the events in the Mediterranean as what they actually are, apart from political debates about asylum and immigration: Stories of individual catastrophes, experiences of defeat, hope and loss.
Enia's reports document the events no longer out of a perspective, which wants to reflect them as a "crisis of the others", the alleged "invisible", but above all a crisis of the European societies. Like the cancer that is slowly killing Davide's uncle from the inside, inaction and deliberate failure to help are slowly eroding the European self-image as a self-declared model of solidarity and human rights. A disease that threatens our communities more profoundly than any migration ever could do.
With this project, we want to contribute to supporting the sea rescuers in the Mediterranean in their courageous and indispensable work. We therefore want to donate a significant part of our revenue to the Sea-Watch e.V. organisation.
starring: Alexander Finkenwirth
staging: Andreas Merz Raykov
In cooperation with Sea-Watch e.V.
Donation account:
Account holder: Sea-Watch e.V.
IBAN: DE77 1002 0500 0002 0222 88
BIC: BFSWD33BER
Reason for payment: Soli-Event FINSTERNIS
Guest performance enquiries please directly to:
kontakt(at)andreas-merz-raykov.de
supported by:
