The origami of tragedy: folding there and then into here and now

Turku-Hiroshima is a guided walking tour to a destination both near and far, familiar yet unrecognizable: your very own home town after a nuclear attack. The set up is simple: the very same bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, is being dropped today on Turku, my home town. Besides this set up, there is no fiction and no added drama in this guided tour, only facts taken directly from the well documented parallel reality in Hiroshima. We start our journey at the Turku Castle, 3 km from the ground zero, and walk through the different zones of destruction. We don’t ask who did it, we don’t ask why, we just witness.

This show was created by mistake (that is, if you believe in mistakes). As I was looking for an apartment in the city center and an online tool to show distances in radius, I found the Nukemap site. I chose the “Little Boy” bomb, set the cursor on the central square in Turku, and pressed Detonate. What I saw made me forget about searching for apartment, and instead sent me on a journey through the vast documentation of Hirshima’s nuclear bombing. To my astonishment I found so many equivalents between the HIroshima of 1945 and Turku of today: population size, topography and more. Soon after, I started to find peculiar “portals” between the cities in the 2 points of history, such as the bronze Buddha statue that partially melted in a temple in HIroshima, and a bronze statue of similar size, located in the same distance from the now-to-be ground zero in Turku. I was guided into this guided tour by facts who unfolded in front of me one by one.

Just how probable this unthinkable scenario is – learning about the volume, proliferation and the history of a near-go accidents – was something I found so terrifying that it was (and still is) difficult to be genuinely scared of. Yet in this guided tour we do not turn away our eyes, but instead look straight into the possible horror. What we find is the certain beauty that is all around us in our pre-bomb world. Let us stay here, and now.

Turku-Hiroshima: Ydinkeskusta was made and performed 2022-2024.

Concept, script, performance: Ishmael Falke

Dramaturgy: Ville Kurki and Iiris Syrjä

Production: Grus Grus Theatre, as part of the Äkkilähdöt lähelle / Sista minuten / Last minute site-specific performance series.