ESSAY: Are We Really up to the Greeks?

The grand narratives seem to be right back in fashion. During the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL, they unfolded in parks and squares, right there amidst everyday life. Even in Ledeberg. Even with people on stage and in the audience who might never have ventured inside a theatre. In short, this festival brought theatre home to the polis. Or does it only seem that way? We hear more and more often that the great Greek stories are really fitting for our time, but is that idea correct?

“This place is wild!” A man and his wife have found their way to the Standaert site, a reclaimed park in the middle of Ledeberg surrounding a new community centre. They’ve come for a performance in the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL, but they don’t really know where  they are. They ask other people who wander in: where are they, exactly? People point in various directions. “Ok, so the Brusselsesteenweg is over there and Ledebergplein is that way. I get it now!” In a way you can imagine Greek tragedies working that way today as well: like fixed landmarks that help you understand exactly where you are in life, so you can simultaneously discover places where you’ve never been before. And then you can say: “This place is wild!”

It’s noon on a Wednesday, and the sun is high in the sky. De Broederij community centre has a screen displaying its busy programme of activities for the day, one that any committed neighbourhood would die for: a farmers’ market at 2 pm, children’s yoga at 3:30, Indian dance with Ashu at 5:30, Amaro Kher youth club at 6:30 and even an open bicycle workshop where you can work on your own bike. And today Helena  is part of the mix, a theatre production based on Euripides’ Helen. It’s free, right here in the shade of the large overhang.

You might call it the ultimate outcome of decades of debate in Flemish theatre about its role and rootedness in society, given the growth in attention to ‘art and urban life’ since Black Sunday in 1991, when the extreme right won the Flemish community elections. For many years, the question of how to get the city into the theatre prevailed. It has only recently dawned on larger institutions that ‘participation’ is a two-way process: the arts also need to be willing to get involved in neighbourhood life.

The classic ‘inside out’ principle of cultural dissemination (we spread the culture we like so that you learn to like it too) is increasingly being traded in for the ‘outside in’ principle of ‘cultural democracy’ (we start with what you know to create something that is new to both of us). After many years of condescension towards socio-artistic work, it is now eagerly appropriated in regular seasonal programming everywhere from city theatres to arts centres. If we ask society to go on supporting the theatre, the theatre must also belong in the city. That is the new belief. Any self-respecting cultural centre today acts on the premise that its plays reach far beyond the stage. Art shall belong to everyone.

FIRST-CLASS CURATING

So here we are now. In tight formation, the Takkenorkest or ‘orchestra of twigs’ drum us into line, turning us into a community. Nine kids with drums in all shapes and sizes beat the bounds of this ordinary place, turning it into mystic ground. They are part of the Ledebirds, the local band that includes musicians of all skill levels and plays music from all over the world. Their whirling changes of tempo hint at a secret pact with their coach’s hand gestures, but their spontaneity speaks loudest. We are welcomed just as casually by the actor and director Ali Can Ünal on a journey from Ledeberg to Egypt, Troy and back again: spontaneously, as if we had met in the marketplace, but dressed in a fluttering white robe hemmed with gold.

It feels a bit like an improvised ritual, enacted by ten musicians playing a cheerful tune. They’ve spent a couple of weeks working with Dick van Der Harst, the former city composer of Ghent and the late Eric De Volder’s musical comrade. In a colourful procession, the band heads for the area beneath the overhang, with us in tow. This is how simple theatre can be. Just a Wednesday afternoon. In Ledeberg. Have many of the neighbours have turned up? At first glance, I see more people of colour among the actors than in the audience. Although there are two hundred of us.

The ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL aims to turn Ghent into ‘the Athens of the 21st century’ for eight weeks. Promotional hyperbole? On paper, at least, the programme as a whole is first-class curating. Has this country seen anything comparable since Over the Edges, when Jan Hoet made the whole city resound with art? Based on a convincing dramaturgy, the festival brings a profoundly historical experience of festival, mourning and community into the urban life of today, with a clear structure and ten crystal-clear axioms: carte blanche for everything, everything as a one-off, everything in the daytime, everything in the open air, everything for free. A lot of thought has gone into exactly which artists could be paired with exactly which places for each of the 32 surviving tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Together, they constitute a line of programming over eight weeks that leads from the theatre itself, in the city centre, to the most socially diverse neighbourhoods such as the Bloemekenswijk and the Watersportbaan.

At the same time, the entire city is involved, with the active participation of a representative range of social organisations, cultural grassroots associations and various minority groups – and, beyond that, issues facing Ghent and facing Europe both form direct sources of inspiration. In short, the narrative behind the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL is absolutely spot on. This festival unearths the inaccessible heritage of the Greeks for everyone in Ghent, right at the time when major ethical questions are heating up the public debate. In both artistic and urban terms – and, specifically, by combining the two – NTGent is pushing back the boundaries of what we believe that art can do and mean. On paper, that’s an absolute triumph.

And in practice? Helena  brings all these principles neatly together in a madcap fancy-dress party by Ali Can Ünal and five actors from Jong Gewei, the youth wing of the theatre company Kloppend Hert. It’s not a real play that we get to see, but more of a spontaneous happening with generous lashings of greasepaint, curly wigs, drag, pink cheeks, stick-on moustaches and deliberately hammy acting. After all, Euripides’ Helen  – named after the ‘adulterous’ beauty for whom the Trojan War was fought – was more of a tragicomedy than a tragedy. Jong Gewei has focused on the comedy.

Helen turns out to be a bimbo, her husband Menelaus is anything but a hawk-eyed military general, and the Egyptian king Theoclymenus is a teenager with too much testosterone. They all come together after the Trojan War in Egypt, where Helen had been throughout the war according to an alternative narrative, in which Paris had escaped to Troy with a mere phantom of the real Helen thanks to a trick by the goddess Hera. What is true, what is false? While Ünal, as the master of ceremonies, does his utmost to stick to the story, his actors have the time of their lives turning it into silly mischief. Instead of churning out Euripides, they prefer to perform sketches: a seduction scene between Paris and Helen in a bar, a beauty contest between Aphrodite, Athena and Hera (or the beautiful, the intelligent and the powerful), and last but not least, a bout of Turkish wrestling with olive oil and ‘Troy’ and ‘Sparta’ embroidered on the wrestlers’ shorts. We’re watching daytime television on stage, interspersed with atmospheric music by the Ledebirds.

CLASSICS AS CARCASSES

What does this tell us? Deep beneath the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL, something is lurking that I experience as a strange paradox. This festival has very consciously chosen the Greek tragedies as a unique response to the needs of our time, but in quite a lot of creations, they turn out to be a mere springboard to something entirely different. For many makers, the tragedies themselves function more as a blank projection screen, a big jar of sweets from which you can pick out what you like and leave the rest untouched. Their adaptations tend towards the subtle misuse that Jan Koenot describes in his essay ‘How Tragic were the Greek Tragedies?’ (2020): “All too often, ‘old masters’ are used to conceal oneself behind their prestigious figure, to lend one’s own thoughts stature and legitimacy.”

The result of such adaptations on stage is a mere shadow of the original, as we also see many times over in Ledeberg. It is not uncommon for only the core story and main characters to remain, or for a performance to consist of free variations on one or two basic themes. Anyone coming to this themed festival because they were curious about all those unfamiliar tragedies would encounter them as old Priam found the body of his son, Hector, after Achilles had dragged him many times around the city: mutilated beyond recognition by all the bumping and battering, stripped of everything that made him great. You could almost call it schizophrenic: the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL sells Greek tragedy as universal and relevant, but often implies the opposite on stage: these texts have reached the end of the story.

I’m not saying that the tragedies should be performed the way they were written. Every age asks for its own emphases to be placed. Adaptations are self-evident. And every update implies cutting and pasting, paring down and colouring in. Yet it strikes me that for a whole week in Ledeberg, I’ve hardly heard a single response from the plays at the heart of the festival, unless we count the intermezzo during the closing round-table discussion on Sunday, inspired by Euripides’ Phoenician Women – but more on that later. We saw the same thing in Milo Rau’s Medea, Luanda Casella’s Elektra and Chokri Ben Chikha’s Perzen: they used their chosen classics merely as a framework, a carcass. They stripped them of all their text and rhetoric to brew a play of their own from the central trauma or dilemma. That’s not without logic for repertory, but you rarely see it happening so radically with Shakespeare or Chekhov, wiping the slate so clean. There’s something about these Greek plays that actually isn’t  enough anymore.

Nowhere is this as clear as in Helena. In all its enthusiasm, Jong Gewei hasn’t retained a single one of the issues tackled in the play. What are the makers of these sketches concerned with? The joy of acting seems to be the main force that drives them. They perform the Greeks as curiosities, simulacra – with a plastic lyre, a plastic shield, a plastic helmet with waving plumes as iconic signs of our popular image of the Greeks. We sit and watch the image  of a tragedy, in which only the external markers and the basic story still speak. Alessandro Baricco, the author of The Barbarians, would have plenty to get his teeth into: Helena  surfs the rapid waves of our associative image culture rather than plumbing the depths with focused concentration. Is that the consequence of our new cultural democracy?

The meaning of the tragedy is shifting from what it has to say to who performs it. It’s not about the play but about the makers and actors. In this case, perhaps, might they just as well have performed something else? In one fell swoop, this dilutes the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL from a festival of tragedy to the image  of a festival of tragedy. The meaning is located more in the how  than the what. The story behind the festival speaks more than the actual stories on which it is based.

WHERE HAVE THE GODS GONE?

This implicit distancing from the tragedy goes further, incidentally, than the axe taken to the story. We also seem to have more difficulty with the Greeks’ world view than any of the interviews announced have revealed. You notice it, for example, in Pleun Van Engelen’s interpretation of Andromache, performed the previous day under the same overhang on the Standaert site. Unlike Jong Gewei, the graduate of LUCA Drama in Leuven is fully acquainted with the Greeks. In previous productions, she drew inspiration from the characters of Achilles and Polyxena. Here, in I Went to Troy and All I Got Was Another Greek Tragedy, she tackles the fate of the famous Trojan queen who is enslaved by the Greek warrior Neoptolemus, the murderer of her own young son. How does a woman deal with that trauma when her new husband wants a fresh start? In Euripides, it results in a parade of characters coming and going, from Menelaus to Orestes. In Van Engelen’s version, everything is stripped down to a tense confrontation between a fiery Andromache (the maker herself with black streaks around her eyes) and a remarkably understanding Neoptolemus (Jonathan Michiels as Mr Nice Guy). At stake in their rhetorical swordplay is the question: is there a future after polarisation? Absolutely so, it turns out at the end: this Andromache  ends with smiles of understanding on either side after a sweet little gift from Neoptolemus.

In Euripides, however, the chorus had the final say: “The deeds of the gods appear in many shapes. And they often accomplish deeds beyond our hopes. Our wishes might not be granted but the gods will find ways of achieving things we never thought were achievable. Such was the path of our story.” Just before that, the Greek tragedian has guaranteed a happy ending, just as he did in Helen, with a deux ex machina, a divine intervention to restore order.

Where have the gods gone? In contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedies, the whole focus is on human beings, the characters who look like us. They are consistently performed as individual egos who seem to bear the guilt for what has happened themselves, who have to learn to process their trauma, and can even decide for themselves whether change will come to pass. All higher orders have faded – or are ironicised, like the beauty contest in Helena  between Aphrodite, Athena en Hera. Of course that is not without logic in itself. In the 2,500 years between then and now, many centuries of humanism, rationalism and modernism have been laid over the Greek world view, not to mention liberalism and neo-liberalism. Individual free will has become a given.

In I Went to Troy, it is precisely that personal autonomy that is constantly emphasised: Andromache is told repeatedly by her enslaver that she is free to leave if she wishes. Ultimately, he steps out of their double bind three times himself, to go for a walk. And that turns out to be more than a rhetorical game. It is a deeply held philosophy: as humans, we are in control. The climate crisis may recently have permeated us with posthumanism – in which humanity is no longer at the centre of life on earth – but this vision still doesn’t really seem to have reached our theatres. Everything that transcends the human in Greek tragedy is soon rejected.

The same applies to the maker with regard to the chosen play. The midpoint of creations almost always remains the autonomous artist, projecting his/her/their personal concerns onto the Greeks. It’s not up to the Greeks to teach us anything about our existence, it’s our job to mould the Greeks to fit our concerns. It’s almost insane to call that contemporary poetics into doubt today, and yet I have started thinking about it in this succession of adapted tragedies. In fact, with our Western ideology of freedom, we can’t cope with this deterministic pre-Enlightenment thinking – not as citizens and even less as makers. Whatever the Greeks wrote, we are the ones who are going to decide what happens. We prefer a bit of DIY. Our belief is called ‘self-determination’.

METATRAGEDY

That creative autonomy is also something you see literally on stage. What is striking is the profusion of metatheatre that accompanies performances of Greek tragedies. Medea’s Kinderen, Elektra Unbound, Perzen: all of them stage themselves first and foremost as theatre. In each case, we only get to see the chosen play as a ‘peek behind the scenes’, during which the actors discuss the tragedy and its meaning with each other. They switch constantly between their fictional roles and themselves as actors. Rau’s Medea  begins with an after-show talk featuring the child actors involved. In Casella’s play, we follow the casting and rehearsals for the role of Electra. And with Ben Chikha, we get a sneak peek at a performance of Perzen. We seldom get to see an actual performance of the Greek plays. We get a performance of the performance. And by the end, we know at least as much about the actors as about the characters they are playing: they literally write themselves into history. Pleun Van Engelen’s Andromache  works along the same lines. Half of the dialogues she has written herself are actually conversations with her co-actor, in which both slip subtly in and out of their character roles. What is real, what is acted? Van Engelen has referred to her theatre in the past as ‘stand-up tragedy’.

This betrays a subjective relativism that is a long way from the figures at the heart of the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL. In their original incarnations, Andromache & co avoid all irony, committing entirely to their allotted roles. Neither do they really question these roles. Or, more accurately: they accept all those questions. Today we seem to have much more difficulty with that, as children of the ‘century of the self’. For example, our modern beliefs like to turn Antigone into an independent heroine of the resistance, although she was actually just following the sacred natural law that says you must always bury the dead. Antigone had no choice at all. This is also what the philosopher and classicist Ben Schomakers wrote in his essay De tranen van Electra (2021): the freedom of Greek heroes consists of their identification with the deed that is their fate. They act on the basis of a responsibility that they do not choose, one that is imposed on them. Schomakers states that this often leads us to misunderstand Greek tragedy. Classic tragic plays do not portray an unfortunate twist of fate or a restriction of our human freedom. They depict a ‘becoming what we already are’, a reconciliation with the deep dynamics that have preceded us, as defined by history. This is more or less the opposite of self-determination.

Likewise, all that metatheatre highlights how many theatre makers wrestle with the key tension of our late-stage democracy in a Europe that is moving further to the right, beneath the threat of melting ice caps: that tension between the sickening feeling that there is nothing more to be done and the urgent sense that we absolutely have to do something. It is a clash between the growing realisation that our optimistic belief in progress is finite, perfectly reflected in all those premodern tragedies that were hardly affected by that optimism, and the compelling urgency to defend the great modern values again. In I Went to Troy, for example, this value is ‘the truth’, in its rationalist form as scientific fact. Because while Michiels relativises the matter, saying that the Trojan War ‘is only a story, after all’, Van Engelen has to make it clear to him that Troy did actually exist, that archaeological evidence has been unearthed. ‘Truth’ is the main theme of her adaptation, in reaction to her own father’s imagined conspiracy theories. Her adaptation of Andromache  takes a stand against fake news and other drivers of polarisation. She explicitly resists the relativist idea that there are many truths.

And here we see the paradox that I sense is brewing beneath several of the plays at the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL. The festival is a perfect fit for the general tendency within the art world to distance itself for good from sceptical postmodernism and the ‘end of all grand narratives’ (Lyotard). NTGent feels the need to come up with its own grand narrative again: an appealing story of inclusion, emancipation, community and even a hint of the educational. Because that is simply what our time requires. And because we need to go on believing that democracy can still be saved, and that the theatre – city theatres – have a role to play in that.

The ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL bears witness to a thoroughly modernist ideal. The fact that several performances seek solace in postmodern techniques – vulgar pastiche in Helena, metatheatre in I Went to Troy – is probably only a detail. But you do wonder whether Greek tragedies are really the best material for this optimistic narrative. The Greeks’ vision of humanity and the world sometimes seems – here in Ledeberg – to be at odds with the festival’s philosophy: a profound belief in the self-determination of the city. Yes, the grand narratives are right back in fashion. But do the grand narratives of the Greeks tally with the grand narrative of ‘cultural democracy’ as well as we keep assuming?

CHORUS OF WOMEN

The parade entitled Smeekbede!  offers a somewhat ambiguous answer. This creation, like the others, only retains the central idea of Aeschylus’ Suppliants: the collective voice of women standing up for their fate. In the original play, the oldest of all the surviving tragedies, they are all fleeing from forced marriages and plead with King Pelasgus for safe access to the city of Argos. In Ledeberg, they process from De Vijvers residential care centre to the Keizerpark, stopping here and there on their way and making their plea heard in tight formation. Is this a lament? A protest? A marching song?

The unpublished trio of makers Kapinga Gysel, Bieke Purnelle and Lara Staal interviewed local women of all ages about their concerns, distilling from them a surging chant that demands attention to the invisible care that women provide every day. It is a call for acknowledgement, but not without the necessary humour. ‘Pots and pans, do the washing / slops a-sloshing, teeth need flossing / kitchen sink, space to think / dirty nappy, keep you happy.’ The most striking element is a simple yet tight choreography between the women, each with a yellow bandana around their neck. From an anonymous horde of about thirty girls and women (not the fifty that Aeschylus has), they reveal themselves as a polyphonic unit, a shifting, intergenerational song. ‘See us standing here again / aren’t they ashamed of the world of men? / we’ve done this so many times before / we’ll keep on going to be sure’.

The feminism that resounds through Smeekbede!  is far from the Greek view of women and humanity. Pleading is not really what these women from Ledeberg are doing. They are demanding their place in the world with great vitality, blaring out their existence through the streets of the city, confirming their place in history. Unlike in Aeschylus, they do not need the approval of men or gods to do so. As befits the modern mortal, they are doing it for themselves. Yet this intervention, for all that it has sung itself free of the original story, seems to chime more with the fundamental frequency of the tragedy than any other festival creation here in Ledeberg. After all, Smeekbede!  acknowledges the chorus as the basis of democracy. Here the players speak as a collective as well as in the name of all their peers who cannot make their voices heard. ‘That is the voice / the voice of women who sing / carry and bear / on strong shoulders for building.’

In the true sense of the word, we see a representation  here of both our sheer human existence and of the society we share. What is happening here feels profound and universal. The intergenerational approach certainly also helps you understand clearly what Schomakers might mean by ‘becoming what we already are’ as the key to the Greek (lifetime) relationship with freedom. These parading women assume their role in the wheel of time, but not without giving voice to the sacrifices that this role demands. They give us a glimpse of how the grand narrative of the Greeks still can correspond to the grand humanist narrative of equality and emancipation. They give us a feel for what a ‘cultural democracy’ might look like.

That is precisely what makes it doubly clear that this group of women are too white to reflect Ledeberg as a whole. “You really have to do your best to keep things this monocultural today”, my girlfriend grumbles as we join the back of the procession at De Vijvers. The truth is probably that the time and resources were lacking for genuine fulfilment of the inclusive promise behind the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL – theatre by everyone, for everyone – time to gradually gain trust in the neighbourhood, create ownership, make a difference. The lack of diversity in this procession confirms once more that this festival of tragedy, as cunningly curated as it is, remains a mere idea  to some extent, an external image – yes, a grand narrative – of what it might mean to unite and change the city with the theatre. It aims to fly so high that it inevitably plummets down from its mirage from time to time, crashing face-first onto the cold stones of reality: the reality of city districts, suburban neighbourhoods. Ideals are one thing, but actually putting them into practice is something else entirely.

IMPERFECTION

For me, the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL reveals above all the struggle – or maybe even the tragedy? – of the left today. The paradox of the festival is that of our entire, progressive community: the tension between the uneasy sense that there is nothing more to be done and the urgent feeling that we absolutely have to do something. This dilemma surely also shapes the round-table discussion that brings week five to a close, inspired by the quintessential tragedy in which polarisation leads to ruin: The Phoenician Women by Euripides. Exactly one week before the elections on 9 June, it offers food for thought on the state of our democracy. Is there any future for the great, enlightened value of organised social and political dialogue? NTGent and the Masereelfonds deliberately seat themselves in a very high place, as if they were on Olympus itself.

From the top floor of the multistorey car park beside the motorway exit in Ledeberg, unprotected from the chill winds of our time, we gaze out over society. The classicist Zoë Ghyselinck asks her speakers, perched on folding chairs in parking spots 724 and 725, to shed their light on populism, polarisation, neoliberalism, party politics, the cracks in our political landscape, the tendency to extremes, the influence of social media, the sense and nonsense of local policy and so on. Why is my heart sinking deeper and deeper?

It’s not that the people invited to speak have no interesting insights to share. Gender specialist Bieke Purnelle from ROSA vzw draws our attention to the ominous ideological gulf that is growing between boys and girls. Cultural sociologist Pascal Gielen from the University of Antwerp qualifies that view, pointing out that it is above all the centre that has become more extreme. Esther Vandenbroucke from the organisation De Zuidpoort, which works with people living in poverty, testifies to the sense of underrepresentation that many of them struggle with. And law student Israe Aiach of the Flemish Youth Council notes that many of her contemporaries have no idea who they are voting for. This is what we on the left are good at: analysing what is going wrong, detecting where the danger lies among those on ‘the other side’.

Personally, I only feel imperfection, in myself as well. In fact we don’t have a narrative at all. Only anecdotes. Or, to put it better: we have a narrative against, but we lack a grand narrative for. And so we hark back to the familiar values of humanism and the Enlightenment, although they only partly proved their worth in the past and now seem to be losing more and more ground. In the midst of that deeply felt crisis, we are wallowing in the age-old tragedy of the Greeks, even though we are unable to accept its full consequences, to resign ourselves to the idea that things happen the way they happen because they transcend us.

Once again, the classics serve here to lend extra symbolic capital and a hint of the eternal to that struggle: now and then the actor Sara De Bosschere interrupts the discussion for an excerpt from The Phoenician Women. Thus we hear Jocasta trying to get her rival sons Eteocles and Polynices to talk to each other before they resort to weapons. “Look each other in the eyes: then you can listen and talk better. Only a calm conversation leads to a wise decision.” So why aren’t we – and that includes me – having this conversation on our Mount Olympus with ‘the other side’? If art is for everyone, why aren’t we trying to look beyond this protected watchtower?

The philosopher Terry Eagleton once remarked that Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘end of all grand narratives’ actually only referred to one narrative. The left-wing French philosopher had become disillusioned with his Marxist conviction that history is driven by a meaningful development towards a better end point, through a process of liberation, enlightenment and emancipation. That idea had lost its credibility for good. All that was left to him was unmasking as a strategy. However, that postmodern movement brought its own set of new imperfections.

The German philologist Sven Vitse once phrased this succinctly in Streven: “On the one hand, postmodernism is said to be too critical: it is so critical of the ideals of European modernity that it leads to a moral vacuum. On the other, postmodernism is said to be entirely uncritical: it implies the thoughtless acceptance of the status quo and of the end of all ideological battles.” It is that postmodern stalemate that we are still trying to put behind us in festivals such as the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL, by shamelessly meddling with classical values and narratives again.

But does that solve the crisis of the left? Will it get us anywhere today? This round-table discussion is overshadowed by the threat of another Black Sunday. A few weeks later, it would be clear that the extreme right had not breached the dykes as much as we had feared in Flanders or France, or at least not as much as in the Netherlands. Some would even claim that the left had emerged unexpectedly stronger. But 9 June was a dark Sunday all the same. We hardly even raise our eyebrows anymore.

Would we understand the turn to the right better if we saw it as a deeper, primaeval power, a Dionysian urge that might even be the real driver of history? As a tragic fate that far transcends our own, one that our theatre with its Apollonian pretentions to cultural democracy might do better to approach with more humility? Should we stop believing that we can change things with a bit of DIY? Or should we in fact be thinking through our repeated narrative about ‘art and the city’ much more thoroughly? And giving programmes like the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL far more legs and ears, so that they can work genuinely inclusively in the neighbourhoods, for and with both the ethnic minority community and the forgotten citizens who are leaning towards the extreme right’s narrative of salvation? Determinism or self-determination: it is still an eternal dilemma. We find orientation points in the classics, but we don’t know where we are standing or which direction we are going in. So it does all turn out to be pretty tragic after all...