Building Stories
Building Stories
In Development
A marriage of theatre, architecture and conceptual art, Building Stories is a site-specific performance for Iran and the UK based on images and oral stories collected from the city of Qazvin. Oral stories create a virtual world where individuals can recall a community destroyed by an earthquake or a house demolished to make way for a car-park. The world they create is not just of solid buildings and roads, it is not merely plans of a city, or drawings of a district. They present a fluid world where each individual’s experience of the city gives it a different value, a different perception of beauty and memory. A road may be associated with children playing football, or an accident that took someone’s life, or the home where someone was born. Oral stories reveal aspects of the city that are important to the story and hide parts that need to remain in the dark.
Building Stories is a collaboration between 30 Bird, Public Works and the London Metropolitan University and in July 2007 members of all three teams spent 15 days in Qazvin and Tehran collecting material.