What happens to an airplane that flies through a cloud of ash? The metal is blasted, the windows scratched to a milky film, the engine becomes encapsulated in black glass. It sounds like a piece made by the artist Anselm Kieffer. A teetering between different scales, different worlds, different kinds of matter. The particles from the volcano Eyjafjallajökull, in April 2010, consisted of extremely small razor-sharp grains of glass. Small, small particles of glass. When subjected to an experiment that resembled the same erosive, atmospheric conditions after the volcanic eruption, it was discovered after two weeks of uninterrupted friction, that the particles had not changed at all: they were just as sharp as before.

 

Susanne Skog’s radio play The Glass Cloud circumnavigates the eruption of the Icelandic volcano. Voices rise and fall, anecdotes and news reports merge with precise descriptions of lava, magma and ash. Here, an ancient Nature beyond our control, and a young earth where everything is suddenly still in motion, collides with the hyper-modern society and our human vulnerability. Words like glass, ash, lava, clouds, glacier, rise out of the collision and are reborn into a violent and poetic power. The continental plates move at the same speed as a person’s fingernails grow.

— Helga Krook