Mantike

‘Mantikê tékhnê’ is the name the Greeks gave to the art of prediction, the ancient technique to see auspices in the flight of birds, the position of trees and bees getting lost. It’s how they read their fates. Today, we swallow ready-made futures, regurgitate prefab dreams of a world that sells itself. We parrot thoughts that are not ours. A past that has been imposed upon us, a nostalgia that we are talked into. The philosopher Walter Benjamin believed that humanity, despite centuries of adversity, had a duty to enter into and shape a yet unknown, perhaps even foreboding future. With his parable of the angel of history, he pleaded for an ode to life, despite everything. In Mantike, Louise Van den Eede retraces that metaphor in the story of Calypso, the loneliest goddess in Greek mythology. In how the banished nymph shapes her future, how she reinterprets her curse and her loss by making a raft out of the smashed, broken wreckage. That way, Calypso helps her own lover, Odysseus, to leave her forever. She shapes her future loss. Mantike is an invitation to discover how we can enter an unwritten future together. Not a prophecy, not doom-mongering, but an invitation to let go of what gets us stuck. To build a future that is not yet spelled out, but that we come up with ourselves. This explosive, visual, freshly written textual performance questions everything to reinvent our odyssey towards the future. What do we hold on to, what perishes, and what should we lovingly let go of?