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I think the Opera Village will lead to a new idea of art, and what will emerge will at some point also raise interest in tourism in Burkina Faso The school will be our centre, educating children from Burkina Faso for whom it will open up wholly new possibilities And who will let us share in their works! It will be a festival for everyone all over this world when we see how children from Burkina Faso develop their own images, learn the music of their country, build musical instruments, start bands, record music, shoot films (Christoph Schlingensief, 8 February 2010)   Christoph Schlingensief was a celebrity in Germany, as famous as a pop star before his premature death in 2010 at the age of 49 During his short life he shot films, directed theatre, staged operas, created installations, invented performances and initiated political actions His final and as-yet unfinished project, the Opera Village Africa, has been described as a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, and the climax of his career The project seeks to create an artistic centre in one of the poorest countries in the world, an institution that will include a school, an opera house and a clinic The village, which includes in its mission statement the aim to ‘overcome the division between art and life’, elicits questions about the status of the artwork and the role of the artist in the twenty-first century Despite his domestic notoriety, Schlingensief’s international reputation was slow to develop before he was posthumously awarded the Golden Lion for work exhibited in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011 Born in 1960 in Oberhausen, a small town in the Ruhr Area, Schlingensief started making films at the age of 8 He released his first long film TUNGUSKA—The Crates are Here! in 1986 The plot of TUNGUSKA, which combines the aesthetics of a Czech folk tale with eerie surrealism, is described as follows by Australian Cinematheque: ‘Three researchers travel to the North Pole to torture Eskimos with their avant-garde films’ The summary gives some idea of Schlingensief’s perpetual opposition to the