Magdalena Schrefel 

Three days before her sister Vera leaves to take up a professorship in biodiversity, Hannah interviews her while helping her to clear out the apartment. They talk about a specific event, a summer storm at the end of the 1990s, that the two of them experienced together but in different ways.

Hannah wants to use the footage for the exhibition Das Blaue vom Himmel that she is helping curate. The reason for the exhibition is a global solar geoengineering measure to cool down the planet. Due to changes in refracting light, the sky will no longer be blue.

Vera’s interview is just one of many, and Hannah delves deeper and deeper into the stories of the people she interviews who come together in one room on the day of the opening: for example, there’s Pauline, who has made a film using artistic means to extend the canvas to the sky, or the old botanist who explains his system of order while he himself loses his own sense of order.

And suddenly there is Jakob, Hannah and Vera’s father. He, too has a story to tell that Hannah has not yet heard.

Das Blaue vom Himmel attempts to tell environmental history as a family story and to find a novel form that can contain more than one story, in line with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory. It is a novel in stories, reports, and works of art that deals with the loss of things we take for granted.