YOU AND I – ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN
Have you ever had a conversation with a tree, a pond, or a stone? Have you listened to the voice of your home or seen your reflection in a bench in the square? You and I is a performance piece that invites participants to engage in an encounter with the more-than-human—natural phenomena, objects, and spaces that shape our daily lives.
The work is self-generative, encouraging participants to experience and explore their relationships with the environment in new ways. Every place has its own story, characteristics, and influence—elements that often go unnoticed in the rush of everyday life. You and I provides a framework for these experiences, creating space for observation, listening, and participation.
Do-it-Yourself Performance in a Book
The work is presented as a self-generative piece in a book, where participants borrow a box containing texts, instructions, and props. The box guides them through encounters with 9 selected phenomena in their surroundings. These phenomena are chosen based on the unique character and includes a bench, a pond, and a plant, or a natural feature that reflects the place and its human connections.
How Does It Work?
The book is available in Icelandic in Skálda bookstore in Vesturgata. 101 Reykjavík, at the Dansverkstæðið, and Tjarnarbíó. Also at selected libraries across the country.
Participants take the book and follow the instructions to experience the piece on their own terms, either alone or with others.
You and I is part of Beautiful, a performance project exploring sustainability and human connections to the environment.
BEAUTIFUL
Fallegt (Beautiful) is the overarching title of two performance projects by Steinunn Knúts Önnudóttir that explore sustainability and the human relationship to their environment. Leiðin (The Way) is a performative pilgrimage, and You and I consists of performative encounters with the more-than-human. The project was supported by a twelve-month Icelandic Artists’ Salary grant in 2025.
Mission: We do all for love
In a time of escalating climate change and a lack of intellectually adequate countermeasures, it is necessary to examine the role of the performing arts. Although the challenges of our time cannot be resolved without radical systemic change, the arts can contribute by awakening awareness and strengthening the human relationship to the environment — whether in relation to other people or to nature itself.
For systemic change to be chosen collectively, there must be an urgent need that motivates action. That need is love and connection: love for our descendants who will inherit the earth, and love for the more-than-human — mountains, streams, birds, and flowers. We do everything for love, and the word “beautiful” becomes a healing incantation that transforms despair into agency.
The consequences of disconnection, isolation, and echo chambers weaken humanity’s capacity to prevent its own destruction. Solidarity diminishes, and suspicion and cruelty take root. Here the performing arts have an important role to play by creating and strengthening connection. Transformative art speaks to personal values and touches our self-understanding. To enable change, people must know what they stand for and activate what might be called the muscle of love.
Leiðin and You and I aim to create an existential mirror through performative encounters that both foster connection and invite self-reflection. They are designed to nourish and calm, while at the same time strengthening participants in their will to help save the world by caring for relationships. The projects seek to generate hope and reduce the fear and despair about the future that have become a global condition, particularly affecting young people.
Method: Relation-Creating Staged Encounters
The project as a whole is grounded in the doctoral research How Little Is Enough?, conducted at the Malmö Theatre Academy. In this research, Steinunn developed artistic methods in response to planetary crisis, including relation-specific performance that consciously work with the connections that emerge in encounters between people, phenomena, and places within site-specific participatory performances.
The method works with the relationships that are formed or strengthened within the performative encounter that the performance constitutes. The works consist of the unique elements that each participant brings into the encounter and are therefore specific to the singular constellation of people, place, and moment.