Untitled. From Staging Times

Sarah Waiswa‘s first photo story is about a woman who has bought a dress at a second-hand market that, despite the recitation of a protective prayer, still contains the spirit of the previous owner. When she wears it for the first time, her body begins to transform into a younger version of herself. A healer confirms to her that she has gained eternal youth by putting on the dress, a wonderful and terrifying news at the same time.

Waiswa‘s dreamlike sequence of images oscillates between life and death, expressing on a visual level the ambivalence inherent in the question of whether it is really worth giving up one‘s mortality for eternal youth.

Freddy Sabimbona and the author Claudia Munyengabe took a photograph of Waiswa as a starting point of each scene of the play Point Zero. Aesthetically, the production is also significantly influenced by Waiswa‘s images. In terms of content, however, the young theatre-makers set another focus. In their collage, they ask about the future of their generation, both in Burundi and abroad. The associative scenes are mainly about violence, death and war. The actors appear more as speakers and bearers of meaning and only rarely as classical theatre figures. In language and direction, Point Zero remains rather abstract. It is a musical, sometimes almost lyrical, then again distorted, grotesque and bitter performance. In the middle of the open-air stage, around which the spectators are seated, there is an open grave. The gravestone bears the inscription: „Here rests the world.“

Sarah Waiswa has started her second series of photographs in the midst of the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic. She rephrased the question raised in the play Point Zero „What if war breaks out?“ to: „What if a pandemic breaks out?“ For a lot of people, this meant being trapped in a monotonous eternity that would not pass. In her series, Waiswa superimposes photos she has collected from social media with her self-portrait. Both she and the other people with whom she shows solidarity with via the visual surface wear a different version of the object that has become the utmost symbol of this exceptional time: the face mask.