Benedetta Bronzini on Medea Material, “Ravenna&Dintorni”, September 25 2025

A work that today reveals itself in its appalling relevance
Benedetta Bronzini, “Ravenna&Dintorni”, September 25th 2025

A contribution by Benedetta Bronzini on Medea Material on the occasion of the preview in Ravenna on September 26th-27th 2025, and the Round Table Medeas: Dialogues on a Despoiled Shore. A dialogue with Anja Quickert, Daniela Sacco, Azadeh Sharifi and Agata Tomšič, moderated by Benedetta Bronzini In collaboration with Goethe-Institut Mailand.

Translated by Melissa Mongelli, Università di Bologna – Dipartimento di Interpretazione e Traduzione.

“Given the times we are currently living in, the appalling relevance of this work by Heiner Müller emerges more than ever before. Despoiled Shore Medea-material Landscape with Argonauts displays the individual and collective devastation caused by the colonial wars. The theme of betrayal, which has spread from the private sphere to society as a whole, takes over individual identities (“I, who is that?” asks the narrator of Landscape with Argonauts) and, after reaching its climax in infanticidal revenge, opens the door to a post-apocalyptic scenario for which the human race appears to be solely responsible – without any possible escape. Here, the figure of Medea appears as a powerful explosion of violence with a domestic interlude, set between two sceneries both of which are the result of devastating defeats for mankind and nature itself, floating between present, past and future. Together with Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preußen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei (Gundling’s Life Frederick Of Prussia Lessing’s Sleep Dream Scream), this text has been deeply influenced by the experience of the boundless American landscapes discovered in 1976, and represents a break in Müller’s poetics, towards the definitive dissolution of text into image. Irreparably tainted by man, the landscape is the true protagonist of the narrative, resembling the Anthropocene theatre. In the short text Die Küste der Barbaren (The Barbarian Coast), published on the Frankfurter Rundschau shortly after the reunification of Germany, Müller emphasized this aspect again, quoting Bertolt Brecht’s To Those Born After and adding: “Even silence in the trees has become a crime…”. Indeed, in the desolation that surrounds human beings, with Müller’s words: “The landscape is destined to outlive the individual. Meanwhile, it awaits the disappearance of human beings, who ravage it with impunity, heedless of the future of their own species.”