In the fall of 2008 Christopher Roth went to Mozambique to shoot a film in the Grande Hotel in Beira, in the north of Mozambique. The former ‘Pride of Africa’, a luxury resort build in the 1950s, had become a nation of squatters, a self-organized community with no electrical power or running water. The last official event took place on New Year’s Eve 1980, five years after Mozambique’s independence from Portugal and at the peak of an endless civil war. The hotel business had given up 15 years earlier anyway; too much trouble for rich travelers, who preferred climbing Mount Kenya or strolling on Zanzibar’s beaches.
So who was partying that night in the Grande Hotel? In 1980 the ruling Marxist Frelimos used the building’s basement as a prison and the first floor as an infirmary. The third floor was shared by military instructors from East-Germany and Robert Mugabe’s men. He had come to power in March and his troops had secured the Beira Corridor, Zimbabwe’s vital access to the sea.
At the time Mozambique was the poorest economy in the world, so poor that even the Communist Eastern Bloc wouldn’t admit it into its Comecon economic union. Almost the entire ANC leadership was hiding from apartheid South-Africa in the south –so Mozambique always stood for more than what was suggested on the map. And again, whose party was it? This void intrigued us to look for more, more set-ups, plots, locations, more parties.
For instance, what happens on New Year’s Eve 1980 in the American Embassy in Teheran? 52 American hostages are already being held for 424 days by the Islamic Student Follower’s of the Imam’s Line. Mahmud Ahmadinedschad proposes to occupy the Russian Embassy as well, since the Soviets are also fighting the allied Islamic Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, who will shift later into alliance with Iraq in the war against Iran because they were not allowed to participate in power. From Ahmadinedschad’s predecessor Abolhassan Banisadr, first President of Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980, we would later learn in an interview that the original idea for the hostage-taking came from Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller and some relative of the Shah. To destabilize the country. The hostages are released six minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President in January 1981. Six minutes? What a coincidence. The plot behind this is called October Surprise: arms supply in return for a postponement of the hostage’s release until after the election in October 1980. Or: Fuck Jimmy Carter!
Three months later, in March 1981 Ronald Reagan is shot by John Hinckley Jr. missing the President’s heart by less than an inch, the bullet piercing his lung. Hinckley wants to impress Jodie Foster or the character she plays in Taxi Driver, a twelve-year-old prostitute. Reagan recovers fast, and when his wife Nancy visits him in hospital he quotes Jack Dempsey: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” The December before, Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon with five bullets from a .38 calibre revolver, convinced after reading Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye that he needed to kill someone famous in order to ensure his own fame. In October 1981 Muhammad Anwar as-Sadat is assassinated in Cairo during the annual victory parade by the Organization to Free Egypt, a branch of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. On May 13th Mehmet Ali Agca, the right-wing extremist is writing postcards in Saint Peter’s Square, Rome, when John Paul II arrives. The Pope spots a small girl in the crowd holding a picture of the Appearance of the Virgin Mary at Fátima. At that moment Ali Agca fires two shots at the Pope’s head just as he bends down to the girl. The bullets miss. But the next two hit the Pope’s body and injure him seriously. John Paul will survive and pardon Ali Agca from the Gemelli clinic. Two years later he will visit Agca in prison and Agca will ask him about ‘that queen’ that saved his life. John Paul II will attribute his survival to Mary’s protection: not only did he bend down to the girl with the image of the Virgin, the assassination attempt took place on the anniversary of the first Marian apparition at Fátima. Agca will later call himself the ‘reincarnated Christ’ and be released from prison on January 18, 2010.
Jacques Lacan spoke of the ‘answer of the real’, which is found by the one who pursues unflinchingly the reasons for his destiny. In a way this might have happened to us, and if you look closer into 1984 you might find another big shift, something that changed the world forever.
The Answer of the Real aligns prophecy with reality; it is conspiracy theories, the Last Judgement, extraterrestrials, the Theory of Everything. Answers that interest us, but these answers also are, to paraphrase Slavoj Žižek, symptoms and traces of a future truth. Like Yoda says in The Empire Strikes Back: „Hard to see, always in motion, the future.“ Jean-François Lyotard’s Paralogy comes to mind, the blurred uncertainty and the wrong conclusions which aim at furthering thought. According to JFL the Grand Narrative has been finally superseded by the postmodern knowledge, the Small Narratives, and ‘finds its base not in the accordance of experts but in the paralogy of inventors.’ We came across In Defence of Lost Causes, Slavoj Žižek’s inventory of our post-ideological world, so we immediately decided Mr. Žižek would be the ideal colloquist for this first out of eleven books, since he refutes postmodernism as well as Gilles Deleuze’ and Félix Guattari’s rhizome theory with its multiple and non-hierarchical structure (Mille Plateaux was first published by Les Editions de Minuit in 1980). Mr. Žižek asks for new Grand Narratives to be installed. Talking about 80*81 he emphasized the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1981 in Medjugorje, former Yugoslavia, today Bosnia-Herzegovina. The vision attracted pilgrims from all over the world, until somebody suggested that it might be a fraud. The Communists government immediately intervened. This acknowledgement of a miracle is for Žižek a clear sign of the disintegration of ‘real existierender Sozialismus.’ Mr. Žižek will re-appear as one of the hosts of our yearlong research around the world about 80*81.
If history repeats itself, if history is cyclical we might just be on the other side of the cycle. Somewhere in between January 1980 and December 1981 something was beginning which has just ended now, 30 years later, or is starting to repeat itself. We zoomed out from New Year’s Eve to a two-year overview then to zoom in again, month by month.
The film set in the Grande Hotel was now called Mozartbique and has a lot of masks in it. Not African ones. But Star Wars and Fantômas, Frankenstein and Bunny. Our idea is to develop the idea of the opera. We asked René Pollesch if he would help us with performative evenings in different theatre houses, to compile a dramaturgic progress from a ‘congress en miniature’ into a play or an opera with a beginning a middle and an end. Like almost everyone we talked to, Mr.Pollesch liked the idea.
In a way we will try to put things back together. Have one story line, one plot and one ending. One or two Grand Narratives, one or two Plateaux. The opera will be performed in Munich on New Year’s Eve 2010.
Georg Diez and Christopher Roth