Anja Quickert on Medea Material, “Ravenna&Dintorni”, September 25 2025

Medea, again
Anja Quickert, “Ravenna&Dintorni”, 25 settembre 2025

A contribution by Anja Quickert 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.

“The play Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten was written by Heiner Müller in 1982. He transformed the myth into a triptych that is as tragic as it is apocalyptic, in which different temporal levels overlap and intertwine, through the perspective of a collective self.

The text is meant to be disturbing. It seeks to break the continuity of a “total occupation of the present,” which Müller considers to be the dominant social consciousness of Western developed countries. The past and the future are replaced by a “shortened equivalence between progress and improvement,” which, from the loss of historical perspectives, leads to the loss of utopian perspectives. The West – the white patriarchal system oriented towards the capitalist logic of exploitation and selection – finds itself in a “waiting room of history.” Hope for change exists only at its borders, in the marginalized outskirts: the emancipation of women and that of the South of the world. Both these resources merge in the embodiment of Medea – the foreigner, the migrant threatened by social exclusion, the woman and mother.

“The hatred of the foreigner towards the community that excludes him is boundless: it results into the desire to be accepted into the hated community,” wrote Müller in “[In the autumn of 197.. died …]”, a typescript found posthumously among his belongings describing the experiences that formed him during the pre-war period. At the same time, the “hatred of the foreigner” stems precisely from this exclusion, from a boundless despair that erupts at the borders of the “Fortress Europe” in the form of social, political and humanitarian crises of migration, selection and marginalization. Like a war between the poor and the poorest.

In response to the xenophobic riots of Rostock-Lichtenrade in 1992, Heiner Müller wrote the short essay Die Küste der Barbaren (The Barbarian Coast), stating: “The boat is full (…) and on the agenda is the battle for life jackets and places on the lifeboats; no one knows exactly where they will land, but surely on cannibalistic shores. Everyone is alone with the question of how to explain this situation to their children. And perhaps in this loneliness lies hope.”

Today, 33 years later, the dialectic of hatred has intensified further. Hope, on the other hand, has diminished considerably. – Medea, again.”