Ilija Trojanow

Once they were free, but that's over. Exhibited as art in a museum, they lack any touch, five African masks made of wood - and at the same time made of flesh. Alone in the night , one of them comes to life to meet the outside world. Which constantly locks them away. Because so far away from the continent, they are always only one thing for the police - refugees. Like Timbuktu, whose sorrowful flight haunts the masks in their nightmares. Whose path without return seems like a curse without end.

In his play, Ilija Trojanow interweaves the European guilt-ridden themes of looted art and refuge into a great tableau of cultural misunderstandings. Just as the masks are unable to detach themselves from their context and strangeness becomes immanent, just as Timbuktu realizes only after the failure of his escape that he will never be able to return as a failure and is doomed to a life in between, so the Europeans, too, are mistaken when they think that their own limited gaze is sufficient to understand what constitutes the foreign.