BRETT BAILEY (RSA)

In 2008, the phenomena became even more pressing: 41 foreigners died in a week and 60 thousand people fled into refugee camps. Since then, xenophobia has been increasingly growing: stores are ransacked, houses are burnt, and people are mutilated and killed. Thousands of people are moved into deportation centres and prisons. This whole situation ended up catching my attention. My artistic involvement with the issue of refugees, immigrants and xenophobia goes back 10 years: performing the Greek myths of Medea and Orpheus; presenting an adaptation of Verdi’s opera, “Macbeth”, in the Eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; with Exhibit B, which addressed European policy as far as African immigrants are concerned; and at a public space arts festival in Cape Town. 65 million people around the world are classified by the UNHCR as refugees, exiles and displaced people. We see them every day on TV, in newspapers, on the streets of some town. Countless fleeting images nearly going unnoticed; countless languages blending in a single, more or less cosmopolitan place; millions of people looking for a new place they can call “home”—or they new “sanctuary”. — Brett Bailey

Brett Bailey is a playwright, designer, theatre director and the artistic director of the company Third World Bunfight. His most iconic works question post-colonial dynamics, and they’ve been presented all over Europe, Australia, Africa and Latin America. From 2008 to 2011, he curated the South African festival Infecting the City, in Cape Town.