“If Germany is the ‘abusive father’ that initiated the final solution and Poland is ‘mother Earth’, that bared the atrocities of the Holocaust, Israel is the fruit of this sin; the ‘sick child’ that was born out of this rape.”

This charged, radical quote from German publicist Oliver Tall’s article; “Where Three Roads Meet”, published by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in the summer of 2014, awakened a sleeping beast in each of us and sparked a heated debate between us regarding our countries’ “blood ties”.

Tall’s article addressed different perceptions in Polish and German societies concerning Israel’s policy during the Gaza War and revealed, yet again, the lava boiling underneath the surface of our personal and artistic friendships. That is precisely why this article was our constant point of reference throughout the entire creative process.

In “How’s the Beast?”, our independent Initiative, we wish to examine, each using his or her own artistic tools, the normalization process between our countries and the various collective narratives which crystallized in them since World War II. Once we’ve realized these narrative’s fictitiousness and manipulation, our next step was to challenge them. We wanted to expose them for what they were  nothing more than political theatre.

Agnieszka Tz’zak, Uriah Rein Merchav, Liora Alshech