PEMBALAKAN - Outdoor Version

Roden / Kukata Miti / Pembalakan

Daniel Kötter in collaboration with
Olande Byamungu, Ikbal Lubys, Wolfram Sander

Scenography Natalia Orendain
Dramaturgy Anna Ptak
Production Beatrix Joyce, Simone Graf
Technical director Catalina Fernandez

PACT Zollverein Essen, Politik im freiem Theater Leipzig 2025

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Familiar landscapes have transformed into question marks. The trees have been felled, entire forests have been cleared. And now? What happens where nothing can grow any more? This is a common question in many places around the world. The project ›Pembalakan‹ by documentary filmmaker and theatre director Daniel Kötter is an adaptation of the theatre play ›Roden‹ (›Clearing‹) and undertakes to create a topography of this loss. Three studies from the Bergisches Land mountain region in North Rhine-Westphalia, South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Kalimantan in Indonesia form the starting point for a theatrical and cinematographic trail, an immersive journey into areas in which ecological and social systems have been violently overturned and temporalities are layered one atop the next.
Together with women’s rights activist Olande Byamungu, instrument maker and musician Ikbal Lubys and carpenter and performer Wolfram Sander, Daniel Kötter invites us into a world where catastrophe is a living reality. The question remains: what is possible here?

›Roden‹ continues the series ›landscapes and bodies‹, which was shown at PACT Zollverein in 2021 and examined the effects of extractivism on landscapes and communities in Indonesia, the DR Congo and Germany.