We swallow ready-made futures, regurgitate prefab dreams of a world that sells itself. We repeat thoughts that are not our own, of a past that is forced upon us, a nostalgia that is palmed off on us.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin believed that humanity had the duty, notwithstanding centuries of catastrophe, to enter and give shape to an unknown and perhaps even ominous future. In spite of everything, with his parable of The Angel of History he advocated an ode to life.
 
In Mantike, Louise Van den Eede finds the same metaphor in the story of Calypso, the lonesomest goddess in Greek mythology, in how the banished nymph shapes her future, how she reinterprets her curse and loss by fashioning a raft out of broken pieces of debris. In doing so, Calypso helps her beloved Odysseus to leave her forever, thus shaping her own future loss. 

Mantike is an invitation discover how we can enter an unwritten future together. Not a prophecy, not doom-mongering, but an invitation to let go of what locks us in place. To build a future that is not preordained for us, but that we invent ourselves.

This explosive, visual, freshly written text-based performance puts everything to the test in order to reinvent our odyssey toward the future. What do we hold onto, what does not last and what should we lovingly let go of?