Live Action 21

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

This was never intended as a prohibition, but as a challenge—an ethical test of what art can be after the unthinkable. It questions the very possibility of art: of speaking, representing, remembering, and living without trivializing the inhuman.

Yet might it not be more truthful to say that it is barbaric not to write after such horror? Is it not precisely in moments of grief and despair, when humanity confronts its own abyss, that poetry must be written? Is this not when art responds to its most fundamental purpose and responsibility?

To see beyond. To guide us. To awaken empathy and deepen our capacity to feel—to become better. To reveal vulnerability. To kindle hope. To remind us who we are, as human beings. From Goya to Guernica, has art not always existed as both a reflection of its time and a form of resistance?

To speak after Auschwitz is never a neutral act. To create art—especially performance art, where the body is present, clothed or naked, emaciated or corpulent, speaking, ageing, exposed or wounded—is a choice that carries responsibility. Through this body, this self, this voice, this present moment, we inherit a history of suffering, silence and denial, but also of resistance, testimony, survival, liberation and presence.

Adorno’s uncompromising provocation continues to resonate in our own time. How can we create and live—both physically and digitally—after Auschwitz, after Gaza, while preserving our everyday lives and our humanity?

Those who today protest against ongoing genocide on Facebook and other social media platforms are increasingly silenced or banned, in a climate of restricted expression that resembles a global authoritarian order. In the United Kingdom, expressing support for Palestine Action can lead to prosecution under terrorism legislation. In Germany, public support for Palestine may result in criminal prosecution, deportation, or the immediate withdrawal of public funding from cultural organisations. All this takes place within democratic European states.

Yet despite this systematic erosion of freedom of expression, people continue to resist Auschwitz—and genocide. Such resistance is never neutral. But without resistance—and without what Peter Weiss described as the aesthetics of resistance—barbarism prevails.

Adorno’s powerful moral and ethical statement was no abstraction when it was written in 1949, only four years after Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on 27 January 1945, leaving some 8,000 survivors to bear witness. It emerged in the immediate presence of emaciated bodies, endless rows of the dead, mountains of shoes, and the overwhelming visibility of human suffering. It was a reflection on artistic creation written not from historical distance, but in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe.

Art—and performance art in particular—occupies this threshold between what can be spoken and what remains unspeakable, between the presence of the body and the absence left by history.

In this twenty-first edition of Live Action, artists from across the world—from Cape Town to Dublin, from Lapland to Bangkok—come together to explore, in real time, what it means to create after Auschwitz. They do so with the awareness that what happened then, in relation to what is happening now, shapes not only how we understand the world today, but also the world we are creating for tomorrow.

We do not regard this theme as a conclusion, but as an opening—towards dialogue, vulnerability, responsibility and action. For we know that after Auschwitz, and after Gaza, what follows is not simply silence, but another way of speaking and another way of being. Another way of thinking. Another way of acting.

Through its form, Live Action articulates new questions in search of innovative, creative and critical responses to the defining issues of our time: war, peace, equality and responsibility, approached from a global perspective that seeks to move beyond inherited perceptions and established ways of seeing. It also asks how we experience time, art and life itself as forms of meaning. Or, for that matter, what it means to create after the Holocaust and the concentration camps; after bombings designed with the assistance of artificial intelligence developed by companies such as Palantir and Anthropic. To look at life through the perspective of its own negation.