Minor Music at the End of the WorldWritten by Saidiya HartmanDirected by Sarah Benson

FEATURING ANDRÉ HOLLAND, OKWUI OKPOKWASILI AND FILM BY ARTHUR JAFA

WITH ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTIONS BY PRECIOUS OKOYOMON AND CAMERON ROWLAND A.O.

COMMISSIONED AND PRESENTED BY HARTWIG ART FOUNDATION

Hartwig Art Foundation presents Minor Music at the End of the World by writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman at Teatro Goldoni in Venice on 5,6 and 7 May, during the preview week of the Venice Biennale 2026, following its critically acclaimed world premiere in Amsterdam last October. 

The stage adaptation, structured in three movements, is based on Saidiya Hartman’s acclaimed essay The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance, which draws inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Comet — a speculative short story written in the aftermath of the 1918 global pandemic that imagines the end of the world — and a new work, Dead River, a performative text conceived as a ceremony of life in the wake of catastrophe.

The collaboratively developed stage performance explores the possibility of Black life at the end of the world and in the wake of racial capitalism and white supremacy. Against this complex and layered backdrop, Minor Music conveys an ongoing series of catastrophes that converge at this critical inflection point — among others, the arrival of Africans in New York City, the first slave auction in lower Manhattan, the precarity of Black life, global pandemics, and environmental catastrophes that make life seemingly unliveable. In doing so, it provokes a series of penetrating questions about Black life at the end of the world and the new social formations that arise in its wake.

How does one live at the end of the world? What blossoms in the Black morning?

Directed by Sarah Benson, Minor Music at the End of the World features a film by Arthur Jafa, lead performances by actor André Holland and actor/sonic movement artist Okwui Okpokwasili, and artistic interventions by artists Precious Okoyomon, whose powerful scenographic contribution provides the haunting landscape for the second movement, and site specific reseach by Cameron Rowland, under the executive production of Professor Tina Campt and Beatrix Ruf (Director Hartwig Art Foundation and the future Hartwig Museum). Together with Hartman, this ensemble of artists transforms her original essays into a site-specific performance in three movements:

Movement I: The End of White Supremacy — Featuring Andre Holland
Movement II: Dead River — Featuring Okwui Okpokwasili, with Bria Bacon, Audrey Hailes, and AJ Wilmore
Movement III: The World is Dead — film by Arthur Jafa