Aparát

Katharina Schmitt's project adapts Kafka's In the Penal Colony to examine spectatorship, the observer's relationship to reality and responsibility for one's own gaze. A researcher in a penal colony witnesses preparations for an execution and an officer's transformation from judge to condemned man. The staging studies several connected apparatuses: the execution machine, the colony's system of power and the act of looking itself, which draws an apparently detached witness into the events.