19 September 2020
Oslo, Norway
Tegneklubben appearing in Ways of Seeing TV, Episode 1.
Life drawing the legendary life model, Maurice Budini.
Concept: Sara Baban, Hanan Benammar, Pia Maria Roll, Birgitte Sigmundstad
With: Sara Baban, Hanan Benammar, Maurice Budini, Tegneklubben, Geir Haraldseth, Malaika, Ketil Lund and more.
Visuals and jingles: Center of the Universe
Music: Sverre Knudsen, Center of the Universe
Producers: Hanan Benammar, Rachel Dagnall, Pia Maria Roll, Birgitte Sigmundstad
Editing: Line K. Lyngstadaas
Thanks to: National Museum, au-pair ordning for mangfold og sysselsetting and Fritt Ord.
Background story:
Our last show Ways of Seeing was constructed around the fable of two women with respectively of Algerian and Iraqui/Kurdish descent, who for nine months were lying outside the houses of people in the political, financial, medial and military elite of Norway. The play premiered the 21st of November 2018 at Black Box theater.
Our task was to commit ourselves to a long lasting focus on how the new racism, brutally manifested in Anders Behring Breiviks terror attack in 2011, has managed to get such a strong grip of Norwegian society. The performance was quickly heavily criticized from our right wing government and the often extremely racist rage against us didn't diminish when a series of attacks was done to several of the politicians presented in the play, one of them the country's justice minister. We were accused of inducing terrorism, of hate speech and a vast false narrative of the play and its content was induced to the public, so persuasive that even the state prosecutor believed in it and decided to start a process of charging us and ransacking our homes.
The attacks continued for four months until the perfect Aristotelian peripeti occured: Laila Anita Bertheussen, the wife of the justice minister was arrested, suspected of staging it all. Her actions had displayed the forca of the new right: The ability to understand the power of the false narrative, to use the theatrical methods of creating villains and victims and to build choruses to make society shiver of rage. But this time even the biggest PR-company in the country who was involved in the process couldn't cover up the blunt fact that this had all been a hoax.
The court case against Laila Anita Bertheussen has started September the 8th and last until November.
In this context, the team behind Ways of Seeing is working together with the visual artist Birgitte Sigmundstad on WOS-TV, a TV program of 10 episodes which will be released simultaneously to the court case.
WOS-TV is supported by Fritt Ord.