Pankaj Tiwari

Pankaj Tiwari embarks on a personal and political journey: The Amsterdam-based theater maker, whose previous work PAPERPLANES became a global festival hit, grew up in a farming family in India. In his new piece, THE HARVEST OF BROKEN PROMISES, he explores the sustainable agricultural practices of his childhood and their disappearance over the past thirty years. The work takes us to India in the 1990s, when the opening of neoliberal markets fundamentally reshaped agriculture and everyday life. Multinational corporations such as Monsanto and their genetically modified seeds became the symbol of an industrialized agriculture whose consequences continue to shape rural economies and ecological futures to this day. Tiwari conducted interviews with farmers around the world and weaves together video, performance and folklore into a multilayered reflection between promises of progress and the loss of ancestral knowledge, global markets and local ways of life. He not only builds traditional clay vessels on stage, but also lays bare complex entanglements, making their contradictions palpable: while the desire for “authentic” agriculture is growing in Europe, it has long since been destroyed elsewhere. The result is a poetic, intimate theater piece about memory and responsibility; and about what a possible future might look like under these conditions.