On the day of our presentations, I performed a short monologue at an outcropping of rock above the Slussen subway station. It is a story about Stockholm told from the perspective of a rock. I thought of this monologue as being part of a potentially larger theater project, in which the history of Stockholm is told by the city’s landscape itself (both natural and architectural).
This play would be staged as a walking tour, preferably at night. The audience would be equipped with headphones and flashlights. The script would be prerecorded and produced (with rich sound effects), and timed to the pace of the walk. The audience would be taken as a group through oldest parts of the city, and as they walked, they would illuminate different objects (i.e. rocks, trees, cornerstones, statues) with their flashlights, and the objects would tell their stories as first person narratives. The idea behind this project is to engage the audience in imagining time from unconventional perspectives— how does a 2.5 billion year old rock experience the city? How does a tree? If the materials in a building could talk, what would they say? This type of walking tour would also tell a more or less accurate history of Stockholm, from its geological beginnings, to its present ecological and cosmopolitan state. I started with the perspective of the rock. Here is an excerpt from the script:
"It happened all of a sudden. I woke up from a short nap, and I was covered in a heavy sheet of ice. Can you imagine, human, the weight of a glacier? Even for a rock, it’s very heavy. And what’s worse, it moves! And as it moves, it scrapes away everything underneath.
I used to be a mountain, a handsome mountain. So did all these other rocks that you see lying about. The ice is what wore us down into what we are today— low lying rocks. We were once much younger, taller, and sharper than we are today.
But the ice came and went, came and went, five times. Each time it came, it took a little bit more of us with it. Sometimes it left a few things —smaller rocks, sand, soil. It carved out riverbeds, lakes. Look around, human, everything underneath your city was carved by ice. "
The image above is a geological map of Sweden. As I understand it, Stockholm is situated in the Baltic Shield, which is home to some of the oldest rocks in the world. Rocks around here range in age from 2.5-3.8 billion years old. Humans first settled the Swedish peninsula about 12,000 years ago, which is really just a blink of an eye for an old rock.