"Parade of the Old New" is history painting in a contemporary guise. The panorama comprises 39 acrylic paintings on 1.50 meter high and 1 meter wide cardboard panels. They show coagulated contemporary history, the development of the American body politic from the 2016 election to Trump's defeat at the ballot box in 2021. The title is taken from the Brecht poem "Parade of the Old New". Zoe Beloff casts allegorical spotlights on events in recent American history that have become deeply engraved in the collective memory. After Trump's triumphant entry into Washington D.C., a landscape unfolds in whose vanishing point the walls on the border with Mexico meet Japanese internment camps of the 1940s. The tableau documents the exploitation of public lands to maximize profits, the fight for Charlottesville, the arrests of workers without valid passports across the country and the internment of asylum seekers at the border. It illustrates the victims of the Corona pandemic, the work of caregivers, the lives of people on the breadline, young people painting "Black Lives Matter" on the streets, the storming of the Capitol and finally the flickering light that could possibly be a new beginning.

© Fabian Schreyer

The literature program of the Brecht Festival was realized with the kind support of the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts.
Recording and streaming as part of BRECHT DIGITAL. Funded within the framework of "dive in. Program for Digital Interactions" of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) in the NEUSTART KULTUR.&quot program;