I’ve always had a particular relation to the works of Richard Wagner. As a German, I find they possess this profoundly Germanic vision of romanticism, imbued with a melancholic fascination for decline. This is doubtless very German. I’ve worked on several of his operas throughout my career: first of all Rienzi, then Tannhäuser at the Flanders Opera and Ballet, co-produced with Bern and Leipzig; Tristan and Isolde in Vienna; Lohengrin in Berlin. But the Ring is clearly his absolute masterpiece, a challenge for every creative team and an opportunity to offer a new reading of the work.

My costumes are not simply there to distinguish between the different types of characters (Gods, mortals, Nibelungs, giants, etc.), they are more angled towards highlighting the hierarchy of power in a world that remains fairly close to a contemporary human reality. Nowadays, power belongs to those who possess information, Big Data. Our inspiration for the gods and the giants were American and international oligarchs who have concentrated wealth and power among themselves. They are a collection of very different personalities, each with his or her own obsession or personal belief. They all pursue to some extent the same objective: to attain power through obtaining gold.

The characters’ development through the Tetralogy is mirrored in their costumes. In The Valkyrie, Brünnhilde goes from a “Daddy’s little girl” in her big blue dress inspired by Yórgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things to an emancipated warrior. Between Rhinegold and The Valkyrie Fricka has cosmetic surgery, a final attempt to tame her wandering Wotan. Mime, a slave in rags in Rhinegold, puts his new-found wealth on show in Siegfried; he has gamed the system and joined the dominant class.

Nazi Germany, the darkest period in that nation’s history which pushed exploitation and domination to their extremes, was a natural point of reference. For Mime in Siegfried and above all Hunding, I was inspired by Nazi dignitaries, particularly Göring with his obsession for medals which thus adorn their costumes.

The costumes are the fruit of a variety of different influences. The outlines of the Norns were based on photographs of bourgeois women at the time of the Industrial Revolution and those of the Gibichungs the cinematic world of Luis Buñuel. As for the reality of war, I looked to Nazi Germany, the war in Ukraine and the apocalyptic scenes in Danila Kozlovski’s film Chernobyl. Modern art and fashion also influence my creations: artists such as Oleg Vdovenko and Vincent Rosenblatt have left their mark on my work on the Ring.

Teamwork with other artists also creates new ideas. A part of Alberich’s initial costume was born of Rebecca Ringst’s set design. We wanted to show his enslavement, which is why we decided to add the tubes from the set into his costume. Our work is constantly changing: the costumes are not always set in stone, they can be modified throughout the rehearsal period according to artistic discoveries, an individual singer’s needs and through dialogue with the workshops.

I feel very privileged to have been able to work closely with the extraordinary costume workshops of the Paris National Opera. Their technical mastery, creativity and engagement have been pivotal in the creation of these costumes.

The Ring fascinates me on several levels. First of all, it’s a work carried by some remarkable female characters, such as Fricka, Erda and Brünnhilde, who are notable by their strength of character and independent nature. It is also a extraordinary family saga where Wagner dissects the complexity of intimate ties, exploring love, traumas transmitted from one person to another and the collective tendancy to self-destruct.

Lastly, this saga resonates powerfully with contemporary society. Behind the storyline we see a system of patriarchal, capitalist domination destined to collapse. That is where human will and the force of nature meet head on. The men strive to build colossal edifices to prove their domination but nature will always win. This is demonstrated in the set of Siegfried: an immense inverted forest, trees suspended over our heads, rising and falling, transforming itself into a powerful machine.

When we started to brainstorm we thought of hierarchical structures, Wotan’s power and his desire to control the world. We immediately envisaged the Palace of the Republic in East Berlin, one of the great symbols of the German Democratic Republic. For decades it was the nerve centre of political authority and the confidence of a regime which became irrelevant after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I was fascinated for years watching it being dismantled, it was like the collapse of an entire system, to the point where there were just a few fragments left, remnants of a perished city. This image is the point of departure of our Ring. In Rhinegold, Wotan commissions the building of Valhalla, symbol of a system based on hierarchy and control. The architecture develops with the story: in The Valkyrie, the residence is shown as an immense wall which cracks under the effects of war; in Siegfried, nature reasserts itself, leaving mere ruins, traces of a fading civilisation; in Twilight of the Gods, the architecture loses all logical form as the world tips into a radically different state.

What I’ve always loved about Wagner is how he perceives the metamorphosis of space in his music: he introduces these changes into the score, giving the scenery time to travel from one world to another. He calls it Verwandlung, transformation, which is central to my work. I’m only captivated by a set if it transforms before my eyes in symbiosis with the voices and the score. This synergy raises emotions to unimaginable heights.

One of the main challenges has been the postponement of the production because of Covid restrictions: we feared that a ten-year-old project might no longer be relevant today. But our initial concept, that of an enormous metallic Valhalla, was actually very flexible. We made it a gigantic data centre riddled with cables, mirroring the growing influence technology has on our everyday lives.

We soon realised we needed to rethink the set of Twilight of the Gods. The world has changed immensely these last ten years: there are more wars and we can no longer rely on established values, such as democracy. This last episode is therefore a reflexion on collective amnesia and the loss of memory where elements of the previous operas only reemerge in the form of ruins of a lost world.

The richness of a project such as this owes everything to the collaboration between the different members of the artistic team and the synergy of their work. The Valkyrie is a good example. When lit, the aluminium panel has a fascinating presence: it can reflect like polished silver then change dramatically to profound darkness. The perforated panels can both let light through, disappearing to reveal a hidden world behind this monumental creation, and serve as a video screen. We found a common language where every element supports the others, interweaving to create an infinitely larger entity.

I come from the video art world, and everything around me influences my work: contemporary art, literature, art history. I first heard Wagner’s music in the cinema – it’s been used in over a hundred films – and The Ride of the Valkyries is inextricably linked with Apocalypse Now. There’s nothing anodine there, this music is connected with war and destruction, we have to deal with that heritage.

Representing it in video form is an honour for me, working on these interludes has given me the chance to create actual musical films which complement the action on stage. The Ring interests me now as it tells the story of the end of a system based on power, possession and domination. It represents a Zeitenwende – a change of era – and it’s what we’ve been living since the covid pandemic: wars, profound political change, we can no longer take nothing for granted. In our version of the Ring, gold is a metaphor for artificial intelligence. We see it already in Rhinegold and its power continues to utterly transform the world all the way to oblivion. While Wotan clings onto the old, outmoded system and sacrifices his children to save his own interests, Brünnhilde understands that she needs to sacrifice herself to return the Ring to the Rhine and break the vicious circle of past errors. She is a figure of hope.

Videos are never used to illustrate a scene or provide a set. They add a layer of interpretation which intensifies the work’s dramatic meaning and shows that which the stage cannot: memories, emotional states, metamorphoses, history, places.

In our Ring, technology is central to the concept and video is omnipresent in projections on the set but also directly on the stage. Nowadays, a camera is also an instrument of control and surveillance. From the very beginning of The Valkyrie, Siegmund flees across a polluted landscape, caught in the lens of a CCTV camera. The cameras lurk on stage, too, as if nothing can ever escape their attention.

I also use a thermal imaging camera, the type that hunters use to locate a prey’s body heat. This tracking device then becomes an artistic tool: Siegmund and Sieglinde appear as hunted animals but also as the last creatures who still emanate heat and love. They represent the last remnants of heat and life in the middle of an otherwise dead world.

We’ve been working on this Ring for eight years and the world has changed significantly in that time. Before lockdown we had a different concept. Then covid interrupted the rehearsals. We subsequently put up Lohengrin in Berlin in an empty auditorium with the premiere on livestream. The world was deserted, we couldn’t go out, we had to make do with ourselves. After that difficult period, we felt we couldn’t tell the story of the Ring the same way. What followed was charged with new urgency. Our common language was refined over a number of years.

The video aspect is lodged between the set and lighting design: Rebecca Ringst created the sets with Calixto Bieito, I inserted the video and Michael Bauer developed the lighting in conjunction with the film. With Calixto, we often work against the music. Where Wagner unleashes all his forces, I often chose the opposite: calm, silent images in slow motion. This discrepancy creates an interesting tension between moving pictures and music. And sometimes in rehearsal we found that, all the stage elements – the set, video, light and music – despite their differences finally converged in a one and single direction allowing the whole meaning to burst forth.