Randolph Hartzenberg

I first broke a loaf of bread across the nape of my neck (in a performance context) at the Artspace, Space Theatre, Cape Town in 1976. Breaking bread and throwing bread are actions that relate to the sense of futility I experience when blind prejudice turns countries into theatres of cruelty.

The lines of division, the displacement, dislocation of peoples are indicators of a deeply damaged, wounded social fabric. Victims of exclusion become the excluded once again. Deep connections with home are severed. Every step for the stranger, the exile or refugee is precarious. Expectations of acceptance soon become illusions nailed to the wind.

What concerns me is the degree of psychic damage that results from the application of dysfunctional ideological absolutes which excludes the individual, most often, in the name of nationalism. The dislocated individual needs to belong, but faces the pain of denial instead. This is the beginning of the great suffering of the excluded.

Borderlines are drawn and re-drawn, re-shaping the regions they divide. Zones of attrition have developed where betrayal, vulnerability, futility rub shoulders with anger, hatred, sacrifice and survival. The manipulation of these lines of division represents our failure to acknowledge the common threads of our humanity.

Breadline / Waterline was specially commissioned for Kwere Kwere / Journeys into Strangeness.