SelFist

Bang bang, my baby shot me down!

What if this ‘baby’ were a part of us that no longer fires bullets, but images – as if every selfie were a shot that hits us right in the heart of our own identity?

Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe, who has made a name for herself as someone who likes to take a closer look at well-known stories, wants more from the myth of Narcissus than a handy parable for our era of self-absorption. She brings in Max Mayer, Sunny Jana and Bishop Black, three artists with radically different backgrounds, who look into the mirror and bring to light deep insights about our obsession with the surface – self-knowledge as a ‘necessary and risky’ project.

SelFist invites us to take bodies, spaces and stories apart as if they were puzzle pieces that we deliberately put together incorrectly – until perception itself begins to crackle and the familiar mechanics of meaning pause briefly. A moment in which the self reinvents itself or at least recognises how fragile it actually is.

The production, which continues Tambwe's long-standing engagement with the works of French philosopher Roland Barthes, celebrated its world premiere in the summer of 2025 as part of ImPulsTanz and can now be seen at the Theater am Werk.