Opera Village, Laongo, Burkina Faso, 2010-ongoing
The Opera Village was initially conceived in 2009 and is the fruit of a collaboration between Francis Kéré and the late Christoph Schlingensief, theatre and film director and key figure in the German cultural scene. Schlingensief was first drawn to Kéré by his fascination with the element of participation that underlies many of Kéré Architecture’s projects, and which he likened to Joseph Beuys’s idea of social sculpture. The project lies at the crossroads of art and architecture and is being built as a tangible manifestation of a powerful utopian concept: an opera house at the heart of an African village. Rooted in Schlingensief’s belief that performance also takes place beyond the stage, the village becomes the backdrop against which the comedy and tragedy of daily life are played out. Central to the concept of the Opera Village is the idea of something perpetually unfinished and continuously developing, a respect for the importance of slowness and an appreciation of the course of maturation. In this the compromise between the fluidity of art and the formal nature of architecture is evident. Although there is a project plan, it is being built in stages, adapting to needs as it comes into being, with some elements perhaps never actually being built as a result. The design, as it was first imagined, consists of the main structure of the opera house surrounded by housing, workshops, ateliers, a school and a health centre. Since 2011, a number of the buildings have been completed in phases, for and in collaboration with the surrounding community, using clay, wood and laterite stone found on-site. The as yet unbuilt opera house at the centre of the village is envisioned as a spiral, its open-ended form symbolising the freedom of possibility.