Theatre premiere / Live multimedia performance: Cinema of the Invisible | Fri 11 Dec.

Bruno Brandes, playwright and theatre director, is presenting ‘Kino des Unsichtbaren’ (Cinema of the Invisible), a work staged specifically for the cinema. Together with his team, he is developing an evening that combines theatre, live film, performance and concert. At the heart of the piece is a shift in the way the audience experiences the work: the audience experiences not only the finished narrative, but also its very creation.

The cinema, usually a place of separation between the image and the audience, becomes a performative space within the production. The architectural features of the cinema auditorium and the screening process itself become part of the production: several live cameras transmit footage from various areas of the cinema directly onto the screen. In this way, the image is created not only in the auditorium, but also behind the scenes – and thus at the very site of its production. The world beyond the screen becomes a suspended space; in its darkness, sparks of insight shimmer and glow – sparks that usually remain hidden from us during conventional film screenings. The production explores what becomes visible in what is shown and what remains hidden.

For cinema is also the place where recurring social narratives reflect our present, where the repetition of standardised images reinforces cultural boundaries between right and wrong, visible and invisible, belonging and exclusion. Bruno Brandes shows, however, that film can equally open up spaces for other visions: for possibilities beyond the familiar, for other forms of coexistence, and for images of a world that is not yet reality.

Supported by the City of Zurich’s Cultural Promotion Programme, the Elisabeth Weber Foundation and the Hans F. Tellenbach Foundation.

Switzerland 2026, German, 70'

TEXT and DIRECTION Bruno Brandes PERFORMANCE Edith Kaupp Rivadeneira, Moritz Sauer, Sangita Singh Gangar SET DESIGN Lea Burkhalter COSTUMES Jakob Hodel VIDEO Toni Lind CAMERA Lina Doll, Stella Pozzi OUTSIDE EYE Ilario Raschèr, Sarah Calörtscher.