Das Internat (The Boarding School)

Jury Statement

From papier-mâché and naïve drawings, Ersan Mondtag has created a visually spectacular rapture-like Goth ghost-train at Schauspiel Dortmund: the kind of night-terrors we wouldn’t want to dream of in our worst nightmares. Ever new dark chambers open out onto a revolving stage, with 17 trained and uniformed wards skulking among them, executing mechanically rhythmical everyday routines, like eating, sleeping, torturing. The Internat (the boarding school) and its rich realm of associations in cultural history are presented as an eternal cycle of becoming the oppressor and the oppressed, of victimhood and perpetration, fear and paranoia. This archaic and artificial scenario provokes great philosophical questions: What is a just revolution? When does it tip over into fascism? From what point on is violence allowed? “Das Internat” describes a process of brainwashing where ideologies are continually reversed: a dark metaphor for the world.