The 24/25 season of the Oberhausen Theatre is dedicated to the weighty subject of the German “Erinnerungskultur”. Full of ambivalence and angst, looking backwards and forwards, searching for guilt and atonement, this culture of remembrance winds its way through the German consciousness. 

As mediators between intellectual and urban milieus, artists play an important role in dealing with such complex issues. With one foot in chaos and the other in the creation of new worlds, they offer constructive ways of confronting the shadows of collective catastrophe. 

To do justice to this aspiration visually, the new season moves away from the romantic, sensual look of the previous two seasons. The 24/25 design strikes a balance between formal reduction and the seriousness of the content. The gravitas of the ‘culture of memory’ is taken up formally by a design that avoids flourishes and dreamy colours. The visuals are bold, bulky and angular. Red, black and white frame the appearance and are contrasted with images that look like marketing material for advertisements. Typographically, there is no decorative typeface. Contradictions are elevated to a structural element of the design and made absurd. On the one hand, everything seems normal and familiar, almost everyday, but behind the façade there are hidden depths. 

The use of negative images turns our usual perception on its head, creating a dialectical inversion of the pictorial environment, an uncanny visual alchemy. The normality of the visual world tips over into the unsettling: a creative method by which we can delve deep into the dark sides of our collective thoughts and histories.

As in previous seasons, we worked closely with the theatre company to develop a key image for each play that picks up on its main themes and invites the audience to explore the subject matter.