Europe has learned to talk about borders. It has spent far less time asking what happens 
when an entire world disappears.

EX-EAST is an international theatre and future lab. Based in Magdeburg and developed in collaboration with artists, young people and partner organisations across Eastern Europe, we create projects in places where history continues to shape everyday life—in memories, biographies and political realities.

We are not interested in conflicts between nations. We are interested in people who, in different ways, have experienced the end of the world they once believed in: the collapse of states and ideologies, war, displacement, transformation, or the loss of home. They share the same continent, yet often inhabit profoundly different memories.

EX-EAST is not a reconciliation project. Art does not have to resolve contradictions. It can do something more demanding: create spaces where different truths can exist side by side without silencing one another. Perhaps dialogue begins the moment we stop trying to persuade others that our version of history is the only one.

At the heart of our work is a question that connects people from Ukraine to Eastern Germany, from Bulgaria to Poland:

How do we move forward 
when the world we believed in is gone?

For us, theatre is not a place of representation but a way of rehearsing the future. Our projects bring together performance, film, research, conversation and documentary practice. They are created with the people whose experiences shape them— not as subjects, but as collaborators and co-authors in a shared process of exploration.

This website accompanies that process. Available in multiple languages, it documents projects, encounters and ideas, traces their development over time, and invites visitors to engage with the questions at the heart of EX-EAST. It is for everyone who believes that art can be more than entertainment: a space for thinking, listening and imagining new ways of living together in Europe. EX-EAST is not simply a project about Eastern Europe. 

It is a project about life after the end of a world

A project by Anastasia Tarkhanova and Georg Genoux.

Project Partners: Agency for Safe Space (Germany), Moritzhof Magdeburg (Germany),Theatre of Responsibility Plovdiv (Bulgaria),Sopot NON-Fiction Festival Sopot (Poland), Misto to Go (Ukraine)