Soft War

Love scammers use fake profiles to write to older single women on social media. They conduct a pretend love story with them with the aim of asking them for money, often under absurd pretexts. These love scammers often live under precarious conditions in countries of the global South and have little or no prospects.

This multimedia performance is based on chats that Martina Hefter conducted with love scammers in the knowledge that this is what they are. In these chats, she initially tells huge lies herself. What begins with a certain feeling of triumph and a questionable kind of fun, soon becomes a game that revolves around existential questions.

This soft war confronts two marginalised groups with each other: On the one side, there are lonely older women from the Western world with no great experience of social media who long for affection, and on the other side there are people who have no prospects for the future due to the present global conditions. The needs of both groups have on central term: longing.

The performance “Soft War” is a reflection on issues of morals, blame and truth, while also looking at the term of “longing”. It is a continuation of Hefter’s analysis of this topic in her new novel “Hey guten Morgen, wie geht es dir?” with the devices of the theatre. And not least, Lipeb and Hefter try to explore the possibilities of a contemporary ethics of creative work precisely in the face of this unequal encounter.

Martina Hefter is a performance artist and writer. She has staged many of her texts, either by herself or in co-operation with other artists. Patrice Lipeb is a multi-instrumentalist and performer. He is based in Leipzig and his creative work focuses on the interface of text, music, sound and movement.