With AM ANFANG, Marc Sinan and Kettly Noël interrogate religious creation myths from West Africa and Europe about the origin of the world. The artists confront traditional and religious music from Mali with contemporary European music and tell a fragmented creation story with different instruments, singing and a performance. Interviews run scientifically in the background, played in random order and arrangement, creating an ever-changing context. The transcultural music performance brings together the Djiguiya Orchestra from Bamako with the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the international Marc Sinan Company. Kettly Noël and Deva Schubert’s haunting physical performance and the expansive video installations turn it into an immersive Gesamtkunstwerk.

In the beginning, the experience reflects that the world we live in is absurd and so are the stories that are written about it. We know in principle that there are different theories about our existence, but we still like to settle into our bubbles. Our existence is too complex to understand it holistically and it is often difficult for us to think outside the box. Some people believe God created the world, others believe in the Big Bang and science. For the Peulh, an ethnic group from Mali, the world was created from a drop of milk; among the Dogon from West Mali, there is a tale of a pair of twins who impatiently fell out of their mother’s womb, with a piece of placenta falling out of her, leading to the creation of the earth. The Dogon people are contrary to the fanciful myth, since ancient times in possession of astronomical knowledge, which could be confirmed by scientists:inside only at the end of the 20th century. AM ANFANG makes clear that our knowledge always gives us only apparent certainties, with the help of which we distinguish ourselves from the “others”. Any certainty is just another proof of the limitations of all human perception and insight. We are one in recognizing that any view of the world depicts only a singular, anthropocentric fragment of reality. That which is real is greater. 150 video fragments consisting of song, text, dance and scientific interviews are selected by an algorithm that creates an ever-changing compilation and accompany the live performances. The fragments thus stand in a different context for all viewer:s, representing how our constructs of belief relate to our different experiences in life – how science, coexists with religion and superstition, and how one influences the other. AM ANFANG can also be experienced as an audiovisual VR installation. In search of the beginning of the world, viewers can move freely in a virtual space that offers countless audiovisual perspectives. None of them is all-encompassing. Like our own selective perception, the experience changes with each new rendition, offering all visitors a unique experience.