An excerpt from the script of Matilda Tjäder & Ewa Awe’s City’s:

...and then I woke up, to the same darkness, with marks on my palms, from my clenching fists and my nails’ imprints. It was like a pattern, of an eye or something. I looked into it and out of my palm a round sphere arose. It looked like a commercial center of some kind. A mall perhaps. There was an entrance. Above it a sign, it read:

City’s

“Let’s move into a mall!”

“Big cities are targets because people admire them. Like a magnet to gravitate towards. For interaction. It’s a push and pull that embodies those who inhabit it.”

“Find a pulse through these nodes, with your headphones on the speed becomes levelled and your own breath is concealed by the city’s bass.”

“The city becomes your real-time music video, a one-liner and a million contradicting feelings at once. We all have a psychotic relationship to the cities we live in.”

“Therefore City’s was built. To encompass conflict. Like the eye of the storm. Outside of it there was chaos. But within City’s there was a degree of tranquility, an aspect of perfection, a fairy tale with absent protagonists, just environment, paint-brushed furniture, double exposure so that all surfaces became two, at least, like, a looking glass – a cubicle in someone’s hand, just spin it between your fingers.”

“There’s this old saying, that once you’ve reached City’s there’s no need to return back. She’s like a thinking machine, programmed to please your needs, she’s like a custom made divination, serving you all your prophecies in paper-wrapped lies.” “The question would be: do we do our hair or nails first?”

“My back hurts. My neck has been hurting a lot.”

“Something also happened to time. Thousands of unfinished and ragged thoughts started swirling around. Words and images were pouring out of them like grains of sand but as soon as I wanted to hold on to one, it was already too late. It was taking so long to make sense of it all. An hour or more had passed and I was still trying to locate my phone to order an Uber and make it home but it was an impossible mission.”

“City’s is all eyes and ears, but it’s pleasant. Nothing escapes and everything gets fixed instantly. Reversed into its natural order by the return of dawn.”