“We’ve done it. Life is emerging in the village, and we will continue building tomorrow.” Aino Laberenz’ words resound with relief. She is delighted about the opening of the school and the progress being made in the Opera Village in Burkina Faso. The unusual project was an initiative of her husband’s, Christoph Schlingensief, conceived two years ago in Laongo, a village near the capital Ouagadougou. Under the motto “Learning from Africa”, the famous German theatre director and filmmaker had passionately pursued the idea of a complete village, with school, houses, offices, hospital and a theatre plus ceremonial hall, until he died of cancer in August 2010.
When the school was inaugurated in October 2011 it was the first of three building phases to be completed, and it represented an important partial achievement. Since then some 50 six-year-old girls and boys from the surrounding villages attend classes in the primary school. Alongside the usual school subjects their curriculum includes art, dancing and music as special educational focal points. The building has thick red-brick walls, a special roof that keeps out the heat and a natural ventilation system. A friend of Christoph Schlingensief’s, the Berlin architect Francis Kéré, designed the climate-oriented school building. Kéré was born in Burkina Faso, came to Germany to study and today runs his own architects’ office in Berlin. In 2004, he received the Aga Khan Award – the architecture prize with the highest prize-money in the whole world – for the primary school in his home village of Gando, built jointly with the inhabitants.
“We do not aim to make little artists out of all our pupils”, says the teacher and artistic director Abdoulaye Ouedraogo, “but we are convinced that children enjoy learning so much more in a creative and pleasurable atmosphere.” Goethe-Institut, which together with the Federal Foreign Office and the German Federal Cultural Foundation is among the project’s most important sponsors, aims to use the Opera Village as a venue for dialogue with African artists. Now Aino Laberenz and Francis Kéré are working in Laongo to ensure that the second building phase in the Opera Village takes off so that the hospital, houses and sports grounds are soon complete and ready for use. The last thing to be built will be the opera house itself. And with that, Christoph Schlingensief’s dream will finally have come true.///
