David Attenborough taught much of the world how to look at nature — patient, curious, careful to name what he sees. This new solo work by Agat Sharma begins by killing him off. Not the man, but the voice: the persona through which several generations learned to encounter the natural world as something to be observed, catalogued, and explained from a respectful distance.
In the afterlife, Attenborough discovers he was the first person to say the word "Europe" in forty-five forests scattered across the globe — and that each utterance changed the forest for good. Before he can move on, he has to collect them back, using a device built for the purpose. The search sends him first into his own past, reassembling the jeep that carried him through the Indonesian forests of ZooQuest, his first documentary — a vehicle built, it turns out, from the wreckage of colonial sugar factories, oil refineries, and logging companies. From there the road leads somewhere he doesn't recognise: a folk landscape rooted in Sharma's own childhood in India, where a myth tells of a voice from outer space that once hid inside a body and reshaped the land forever.
The performance stages two ways of telling stories about nature — one that watches from outside and names, one where land and body were never separate — and lets them unsettle each other. Attenborough's own delivery is studied and inhabited across the piece, less as an act of impression than as a way of examining, from the inside, what his particular way of speaking about the living world has carried with it. The sound design tracks the same shift, opening in the polished register of a nature-documentary score before drifting into something rougher and less placeable, built from field recordings.
Research for the project was initiated together with dramaturg Julia van der Putten.
Developed with creative producer Sophia Charap, composer George Demetriou, and scenographer Selina Losa.