two large-scale premieres on two continents within a week:
SCHLIEMANN III in Athens may 29 until june 1st and DO YOU REMEMBER DO YOU NO I DON'T in Bogota june 4th and 5th. This last new work is a collaborative investigation of "Landscape With Argonauts" by Heiner Müller together with a large group of Colombian dancers and musicians in Teatro Colon / Bogota.
In the context of the Festival SACRED UNIVERSAL
Heiner Goebbels offers to develop a new work for Teatro Colón / CNA in Colombia with a new music theatre piece: DO YOU REMEMBER DO YOU NO I DON'T
The work unfolds as a contemporary mystery play, understood not as a religious genre but as a communal form that allows contradictions to coexist without resolution. Mystery here refers to shared uncertainty rather than transcendence, to shared attention rather than shared belief. The performers form a polyphonic body whose internal agreements remain largely invisible. What is perceptible instead is a careful economy of listening, mutual observation, and response. Actions follow a logic of resonance between bodies, objects, sounds, and spaces, rather than a dramaturgy of cause and effect.
Around 15 performers, musicians, dancers, and movers - the majority based in or connected to Colombia - come together over some weeks of rehearsals and improvisations. Their backgrounds traverse contemporary music, improvisation, experimental performance, and diverse traditions and practices. This plurality is not curated as representation but activated as a working condition. Polyphony is understood literally and structurally, as the coexistence of distinct voices that do not merge into a single idiom.
Material and the confrontation with materials plays a central role. Objects, stage elements, costumes, and scenic fragments drawn from local theatre and opera archives become active agents rather than illustrative props. These relics of European theatrical history, already marked by travel and adaptation, are handled, displaced, combined, and sometimes rendered dysfunctional. Their presence points not only to artistic traditions, but also to histories of cultural dominance, representation, and exclusion that accompanied colonial expansion. The stage becomes a site where these materials are neither restored nor destroyed, but exposed to other temporalities and uses.
At the core of the project lies a simple but demanding principle: history is not presented as a linear account, nor as a moral lesson. Instead, it appears as a field of fragments, residues, gestures, musics, sounds and objects that continue to act in the present. As in his former work Everything that Happened and Would Happen (2018), the performance of DO YOU REMEMBER DO YOU NO I DON'T refuses to add yet another commentary to what has already been narrated countless times. It opens a space in which meaning is not delivered but assembled, dissolved, and reassembled by performers and audience alike.
The performance space becomes a landscape in which dominant narratives appear in a state of ruin. This landscape is not arranged to resolve tensions or to offer reconciliation, but to make coexistence perceptible. This does not produce harmony.
Tensions remain visible, sometimes uncomfortable. What holds the work together is not consensus, but music, sounds, images and a shared commitment to staying with complexity, to resisting closure, and to allowing gaps to persist.
The title is a quote from "Landscape with Argonauts" by Heiner Müller.
While preparing DO YOU REMEMBER DO YOU NO I DON'T - a new music theatre performance at the operahouse in Bogota TEATRO COLON, Heiner Goebbels will also present two video- and sound installations at Gallery Edificio Taller CRA 12 ' 19-72 - running from May 15th to June 20th.
Seven Columns
The Fish Will Have to Learn to Walk on Land
curatorial statement: SPANISH (for ENGLISH scroll down) “La historia es una ruina desde la que se puede mirar hacia adelante” — Heiner Müller Edificio Taller no funciona exactamente como una galería ni como un estudio. Ha ido tomando forma como un lugar donde Nova et Vetera, en alianza con Muaré Costumes, prolonga encuentros construidos durante años con artistas que llegan a Colombia desde una relación de confianza, trabajo y conversación previa. Heiner Goebbels llega ahora a Bogotá por una invitación curatorial de Nova et Vetera y por una historia que no empieza aquí. Desde 2019, gracias a la gestión y el entusiasmo de la Dirección de Patrimonio Cultural de la Universidad Nacional, se presentó: It´s Beautiful Here, anthology of sounds and spaces, una retrospectiva que combinó formatos de concierto, obra de teatro e instalación artística para sitio específico en el Auditorio León de Greiff, el laboratorio de Hidráulica y el Museo de Artes de la Universidad Nacional bajo la curaduría de Maria Belen Saéz de Ibarra y Santiago Gardeazábal. En este 2026, su presencia en Colombia abre una nueva ocasión poco común: crear una nueva obra para el Teatro Colón comisionada por el Centro Nacional de las Artes y Nova et Vetera, al mismo tiempo, compartir con otros públicos, artistas, técnicos y equipos de trabajo colombianos algunas de las preguntas que atraviesan su manera de entender la escena. En Edificio Taller, las instalaciones permiten que ese encuentro no se agote en su residencia de trabajo, los días de ensayo o en las funciones. Abren otro tiempo, más lento y más cercano, para entrar en contacto con sus materiales, sus imágenes, sus sonidos y sus formas de pensamiento. También permiten que algo de su paso por Colombia quede como una estela: una posibilidad de seguir conversando. Para Edificio Taller este tipo de proyectos parte de una convicción sencilla: cuando artistas como Goebbels aceptan venir al país, no se trata únicamente de presentar una obra. Se trata también de crear condiciones para que su presencia dialogue con nuestro contexto, con sus saberes, con sus oficios y con las personas que hacen posibles las artes vivas en Colombia. La llegada de Heiner Goebbels ocurre en el contexto de Lo Sagrado Universal, ciclo propuesto por el Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia a través de una alianza de coproducción entre el Teatro Colón / Centro Nacional de las Artes y Nova et Vetera para el estreno mundial de DO YOU REMEMBER DO YOU NO I DON’T. Durante varias semanas, músicos, performers, bailarines y técnicos -en su mayoría vinculados a Colombia- desarrollaron ensayos e improvisaciones entre el Teatro Colón y el Taller de la Sabana. Allí, una pluralidad de prácticas se activó como condición de trabajo: música contemporánea, improvisación, performance experimental, sonido, movimiento y múltiples formas de experiencia material. En paralelo a esa creación escénica, Edificio Taller presenta Seven Columns y The Fish Will Have to Learn to Walk on Land, dos configuraciones espaciales dónde sonido, imagen, cuerpos, objetos y arquitectura organizan experiencias basadas en resonancias, desplazamientos y atención compartida. Seven Columns surge de Everything that Happened and Would Happen, una de las creaciones más ambiciosas de Goebbels. Fragmentos de historia europea, cuerpos, ruinas, agua, luz y sonido se reorganizan allí como un paisaje perceptivo. Los materiales -objetos, superficies, reliquias teatrales y elementos escénicos- quedan expuestos a nuevos usos y temporalidades. La instalación construye un espacio donde las narrativas dominantes se presentan en estado de ruina y donde la percepción se organiza a partir de resonancias entre cuerpos, objetos y sonidos. The Fish Will Have to Learn to Walk on Land, realizada junto a René Liebert, prolonga y transforma la instalación performática presentada previamente en el Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Aquí, luz, reflejo, arquitectura, vacío y proyección conforman una coreografía espacial donde lo performático se desplaza más allá del cuerpo humano y se distribuye sobre superficies, ritmos y presencias materiales. La materia ocupa un lugar central en esta constelación de trabajos. En la nueva creación de Goebbels para el Teatro Colón, objetos, vestuarios y fragmentos provenientes de archivos locales de teatro y ópera reaparecen como agentes activos dentro de la escena: reliquias desplazadas, reutilizadas y transformadas. Esa atención hacia los materiales y sus memorias atraviesa también Edificio Taller, un espacio habitado por impresión, costura, cocina, construcción escénica y múltiples oficios. Goebbels ha pensado durante décadas la escena como un espacio de escucha, colaboración y construcción colectiva. Esa dimensión atraviesa tanto su trabajo artístico como su larga labor pedagógica en la Justus-Liebig-Universität de Gießen y su dirección artística de la Ruhrtriennale entre 2012 y 2014. En Colombia, esa experiencia se comparte también con los equipos técnicos y humanos que hacen posible cada montaje, cada ensayo y cada forma de aparición pública. En su obra, el teatro aparece como una forma de atención compartida antes que como un dispositivo de explicación. Sus trabajos despliegan cuerpos polifónicos cuyas acciones siguen lógicas de resonancia más que dramaturgias de causa y efecto. El sentido se ensambla, se desplaza y se reorganiza entre performers, materiales y espectadores. Las instalaciones reunidas aquí prolongan esa búsqueda. Organizan un espacio donde tensiones, fragmentos, sonidos, imágenes y residuos históricos permanecen visibles sin resolverse por completo. La experiencia se construye desde la coexistencia de temporalidades, desde la persistencia de las grietas y desde una atención sostenida hacia aquello que todavía continúa actuando en el presente. ************************ Créditos Heiner GoebbelsThe Fish Will Have to Learn to Walk on Land, 2025curatorial statement, ENGLISH
“The story is a ruin from which one can look forward” — Heiner Müller Edificio Taller does not operate exactly as a gallery or as a studio. It has gradually taken shape as a place where Nova et Vetera, in alliance with Muaré Costumes, extends encounters built over many years with artists who come to Colombia through relationships of trust, work, and ongoing conversation. Heiner Goebbels now arrives in Bogotá through a curatorial invitation from Nova et Vetera and through a story that does not begin here. Since 2019, thanks to the initiative and enthusiasm of the Cultural Heritage Office of the National University of Colombia, It’s Beautiful Here: Anthology of Sounds and Spaces was presented: a retrospective that combined concert formats, theatre work, and site-specific installation at the León de Greiff Auditorium, the Hydraulics Laboratory, and the Museum of Art of the National University of Colombia, curated by María Belén Sáez de Ibarra and Santiago Gardeazábal. In 2026, his presence in Colombia opens a new and uncommon occasion: to create a new work for the Teatro Colón, commissioned by the Centro Nacional de las Artes and Nova et Vetera, while also sharing with other audiences, artists, technicians, and Colombian work teams some of the questions that run through his way of understanding the stage. At Edificio Taller, the installations allow this encounter not to be exhausted by his work residency, rehearsal days, or performances. They open another kind of time, slower and more intimate, in which to come into contact with his materials, images, sounds, and forms of thought. They also allow something of his passage through Colombia to remain as a trace: a possibility for the conversation to continue. For Edificio Taller, this kind of project begins from a simple conviction: when artists such as Goebbels agree to come to the country, it is not only a matter of presenting a work. It is also about creating the conditions for their presence to enter into dialogue with our context, our knowledge, our crafts, and the people who make the living arts possible in Colombia. Heiner Goebbels’s arrival takes place within the context of Lo Sagrado Universal, a cycle proposed by Colombia’s Ministry of Culture through a co-production alliance between the Teatro Colón / Centro Nacional de las Artes and Nova et Vetera for the world premiere of DO YOU REMEMBER DO YOU NO I DON’T. Over several weeks, musicians, performers, dancers, and technicians—most of them connected to Colombia—developed rehearsals and improvisations between the Teatro Colón and the Taller de la Sabana. There, a plurality of practices was activated as a working condition: contemporary music, improvisation, experimental performance, sound, movement, and multiple forms of material experience. In parallel with this stage creation, Edificio Taller presents Seven Columns and The Fish Will Have to Learn to Walk on Land, two spatial configurations in which sound, image, bodies, objects, and architecture organize experiences based on resonance, displacement, and shared attention. Seven Columns emerges from Everything that Happened and Would Happen, one of Goebbels’s most ambitious creations. Fragments of European history, bodies, ruins, water, light, and sound are reorganized there as a perceptual landscape. The materials—objects, surfaces, theatrical relics, and scenic elements—are exposed to new uses and temporalities. The installation constructs a space in which dominant narratives appear in a state of ruin, and where perception is organized through resonances between bodies, objects, and sounds. The Fish Will Have to Learn to Walk on Land, created with René Liebert, extends and transforms the performative installation previously presented at the Museum of Art of the National University of Colombia. Here, light, reflection, architecture, emptiness, and projection form a spatial choreography in which the performative moves beyond the human body and is distributed across surfaces, rhythms, and material presences. Matter occupies a central place in this constellation of works. In Goebbels’s new creation for the Teatro Colón, objects, costumes, and fragments from local theatre and opera archives reappear as active agents within the stage: displaced, reused, and transformed relics. This attention to materials and their memories also runs through Edificio Taller, a space inhabited by printmaking, sewing, cooking, scenic construction, and multiple crafts. For decades, Goebbels has thought of the stage as a space of listening, collaboration, and collective construction. This dimension runs through both his artistic work and his long pedagogical practice at the Justus Liebig University Giessen, as well as his artistic direction of the Ruhrtriennale between 2012 and 2014. In Colombia, that experience is also shared with the technical and human teams that make each staging, each rehearsal, and each form of public appearance possible. In his work, theatre appears as a form of shared attention rather than as a device for explanation. His works unfold polyphonic bodies whose actions follow logics of resonance more than dramaturgies of cause and effect. Meaning is assembled, displaced, and reorganized among performers, materials, and spectators. The installations gathered here extend that search. They organize a space where tensions, fragments, sounds, images, and historical residues remain visible without being fully resolved. The experience is built from the coexistence of temporalities, from the persistence of cracks, and from sustained attention to what still continues to act in the present. Credits: Heiner Goebbels The Fish Will Have to Learn to Walk on Land, 2025René Liebert: Technical direction and artistic collaboration Benjamin Calais: Sound design Curator: Santiago Gardeazábal Production: Edificio Taller, Nova et Vetera, and Muaré Costumes
2026 looks like a very creative year so far: in India several installations in one of the oldest museums of Mumbai and in an industrial location of former cotton mills, Follow up workshops and lectures are planned for coming September. At the end of May opens a new excavation in Athens followed right after by the premiere of a large scale group performance at Teatro Colon in Bogota. Later on concerts and performances will happen in Berlin and Strasbourg, Dublin and other European cities during the second half of 2026. ECM records prepare to publish Heiner Goebbels' first composition for an extended Ensemble Modern Orchestra soon.
While succcesfully opening the large scale video and sound installation "Landscape Plays" at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai - open until May 15th - Heiner Goebbels contributed with a new work "Eagles" in the "Origins of Bombay" Room.
At the same night - March 14th - Heiner Goebbels presented a site specific version of his recent production Oracle Machine at the Great Eastern Mills and created for this venue a new video installation called Ghosts' Writing
artistic collaboration and technical direction René Liebert
After a succesful new staging of WALDEN with Ensemble Klang (Den Haag), Solistenensemble Kaleisdoskop (Berlin) and Keir Neuringen at the beginning of January in Amsterdam and Den Haag, Heiner Goebbels works - invited by Goethe Institute - on a new edition of the site-specific Video - and Sound installation Landscape Plays- to be seen from middle March until middle of May in Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum Mumbai.
COMING UP: the creation of the performance SCHLIEMANN III in Greece with four shows at the end of May.
More of the staged concert WALDEN during September and October
Staged concert Songs of Wars I Have Seen in October.
Dates and locations a.s.a.p, here or in: calender
2026 starts with a new staging of Walden (Ensemble Version) in the Netherlands in Muziekgebow Amsterdam and in AMARE Den Haag
with Ensemble Klang (Den Haag), Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop (Berlin) and soloist Keir Neuringer (Ithaca / US).
Composer and stage director Heiner Goebbels
Adaption for Ensemble: Pete Harden
Light design Marc Thein
Sound design Micha de Kanter
More staged concerts in Europe will follow later this year: Berlin radialsystem September 9th
2025 was a very intense travel-year with finishing a new radio play in Berlin, an Orchestra Concert of Surrogate Cities in Ravenna, Ensemble Concerts in Brno and London, Improvisations in Monheim and Huddersfield, two different large scale (video- and sound-) Installations in Busan and Seoul and - after 7 years of world wide touring - finally the very last shows of Everything That Happened And Would Happen in Taipei and Paris. In between: occasional lectures and conferences in Vienna, Bologna, Vilnius etc.
2026 will start with re-staging Walden (Ensemble Version) in the Netherlands, artistic contributions for South America, video installation in India, aswell as old and new 'excavation-projects' in Greece - more here soon.
"So, my first gig was a spontaneous collaboration between German keyboardist and composer Heiner Goebbels and guitar legend Fred Frith, whom he had only met 30 minutes before. Their music for piano and processed guitar seemed at first to complement the fractured and dissonant cityscape of capitalist Britain, such as circle the venue, in a probing, disenchanted conversation of provocation and response that raised each instrument to moments of transcendence, often driven by Frith’s mastery of rock guitar, both using and disassembling its authority.
But even this conversation between titans was, for me, upstaged three hours later when Goebbels improvised from the organ with saxophone maestro Raymond MacDonald. This inspired combination was a fight for supremacy that pitted the baroque against the modern, machine-powered flutings and rumbles against a single pair of human lungs, and in the grandeur of St Paul’s, Heaven itself against Satan, the Rebel Angel. To hear it was like witnessing a dramatic and ferocious version of Paradise Lost; Milton condensed down to its two major protagonists, both at full power.
MacDonald fought with furious flurries of sound and the melodic clarity of the sax against, so it seemed, the massed power of Protestant Christianity, eager to crush this serpentine escapee under its divine jackboot. This was a once-in-a-lifetime encounter between two fearless improvisers who, again, had only met minutes before the gig. To provoke, and to catch such music is the genius of HCMF, and both performances will be available to hear on Radio 3’s New Music show." Angus Reid @ Morning Star
"Mein erster Gig war also eine spontane Zusammenarbeit zwischen dem deutschen Keyboarder und Komponisten Heiner Goebbels und der Gitarrenlegende Fred Frith [...]. Ihre Musik für Klavier und verfremdete Gitarre schien zunächst die zersplitterte und dissonante Stadtlandschaft des kapitalistischen Großbritanniens, die den Veranstaltungsort umgab, zu ergänzen – ein forschender, desillusionierter Dialog zwischen Provokation und Antwort, der jedes Instrument zu transzendenten Momenten erhob, oft angetrieben von Friths meisterhaftem Rockgitarrenspiel, dessen Autorität er sowohl nutzte als auch dekonstruierte.
Doch selbst dieses Gespräch zwischen Giganten wurde für mich drei Stunden später von Goebbels' Improvisation an der Orgel mit dem Saxophonvirtuosen Raymond MacDonald übertroffen. Diese inspirierte Kombination war ein Kampf um die Vorherrschaft, in dem Barock gegen Moderne, maschinelle Flötenklänge und -geräusche gegen ein einziges Paar menschlicher Lungen antraten, und in der Erhabenheit von St. Paul's der Himmel selbst gegen Satan, den rebellischen Engel. Es war, als erlebte man eine dramatische und mitreißende Version von „Paradise Lost“; Miltons Werk verdichtet auf seine beiden Hauptfiguren, beide in voller Stärke.
MacDonald kämpfte mit furiosen Klangwirbeln und der melodischen Klarheit des Saxophons gegen die scheinbar geballte Macht des protestantischen Christentums, das diesen schlangenhaften Ausbrecher unter seinem göttlichen Stiefel zermalmen wollte. Es war eine einmalige Begegnung zweier furchtloser Improvisatoren, die sich erst wenige Minuten vor dem Auftritt kennengelernt hatten. Solche Musik zu provozieren und einzufangen, ist das Genie des HCMF, und beide Aufführungen werden in der Sendung „New Music“ auf BBC Radio 3 zu hören sein." Angus Reid @ Morning Star
"
With hcmf// 2025: Rewind, we’re revisiting the moments that made the festival feel alive with collaboration and experimentation.As part of hcmf// shorts Heiner Goebbels presented a series of three intimate duo performances, each one representing an 'artistic first encounter'. In one, he was joined by Mingo Rajandi, a double bassist and composer whose work bridges refined composition and improvisation. In another, Goebbels collaborated with Fred Frith, bringing his singular musical imagination and lifelong commitment to exploration into a constantly evolving dialogue. The final performance paired Goebbels with saxophonist and composer Raymond MacDonald, whose practice emphasises improvisation as a social and collaborative act.Across these performances, Goebbels and his partners created moments of rare attentiveness and discovery — encounters that highlighted the unpredictable beauty of collaboration and the enduring power of live improvisation."
"You have to have seen one of these shows, these shows from another time, from a time when you could dedicate money to art, a time when you didn't think at the speed of light like on TikTok, a time when you considered a show as a cultural object and not as a simple product, consumable and disposable. There are few who can still do that."Thomas Adam-Garnung
il faut en avoir vu un de ces spectacles, ces spectacles d’un autre temps, du temps où l’on pouvait consacrer de l’argent à l’art, du temps où l’on ne réfléchissait pas à la vitesse de la lumière façon TikTok, du temps où l’on pensait le spectacle comme un objet culturel et pas comme un simple produit, consommable et jetable. Ils sont peu à pouvoir encore faire cela.
