Songs of Whales and Wanting

SONGS OF WHALES AND WANTING takes Herman Melville's Moby Dick as a starting point to examine a material that still serves as a model text of Western modernity today: expedition, resource frenzy, surveying mania and metaphysical search for meaning collide.
The performance locates this material in the historical upheavals of the 19th century - the rise of industrial capitalism, the emergence of new production and dependency relationships, the shift in world views. What is interesting here is not the "then" as a backdrop, but the continuity: which narratives legitimize exploitation, which desires drive expansion, and how are categories such as nature/culture, human/animal, technology/fate created?