On the Trail of Frankenstein’s Monster
Celebrating the publication of two new books, this event explores dialogues across centuries and mountain peaks. With Filippo Andreatta, Sarah Messerschmidt and Dehlia Hannah.
The Trento-based Office for a Human Theatre (OHT) directed by Filippo Andreatta is a vessel that brings the landscape itself, the Alps, the Poles, the sky, and all their manifestations, into performances, operas, and alternative mentorship programmes. OHT's research has found undulations, reflections, and echoes in Dehlia Hannah's philosophy of nature. A Nomadic Book (Bruno, 2025) and Frankenstein – If You Love Solitude, You Don’t Love Freedom (Bruno, 2024), collections edited with Sarah Messerschmidt, reflect on activities of the Nomadic School, which takes place every summer at an altitude of around 2,000 meters in the Alpine region, with the aim of developing "a program of alternative pedagogy rooted in artistic creativity, practicing horizontal learning and pedagogical openness." The Alps cease to serve merely as a backdrop and instead become worlds in themselves, places to rethink the very notion of theatre as a “multispecies art form,” to experiment with practices of coexistence, and to analyse relationships between environment and architecture.
In 2021, CApE fellow Dehlia Hannah was invited to lead a session of the Nomadic School. There, around a mountaintop bonfire, she read selections from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or: The Modern Prometheus (2018), continuing her pursuit of the fictive monster across real-world sites haunted by environmental crisis, first elaborated in A Year Without a Winter (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2018). An ongoing dialogue between creative practices, geographical investigations and literary reflections is reflected in OHT’s book, theatre productions and in situ reading sessions of Frankenstein. Ranging across the Alps, Poles and attempts to visit the Tambora volcano whose 1815 eruption set this narrative into motion two centuries years ago, the new book captures OHT’s encounter with the novel through essays, fragments, and scraps of works whose life takes place elsewhere. The book itself becomes a creature holding together a play, a reading session, an EP, a film adaptation, an installation and an aborted radio drama and a series of journeys in search of the monster. Together, these undisciplined encounters consider the site-specificity of books and how they create space.
Books will be available for purchase.
Sarah Messerschmidt
Sarah Messerschmidt is a writer working across the visual and literary arts, and she works as an Assistant Curator at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. She has an ongoing interest in the dynamic relationships between archival practices, literary poetics and the moving image. She loves poetry, fiction, and walking.
Filippo Andreatta
Filippo Andreatta has read Frankenstein around a bonfire at the 79th parallel north in the Svalbard archipelago, staged an abandoned tower-bell via Arvo Pärt’s tintinnabuli and initiated the Nomadic School that moves around 2.000 metres above the sea level in the Alps contaminating performing arts with natural and social sciences.
Dehlia Hannah
Dehlia Hannah is a curator and Associate Professor of Environmental Aesthetics in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen, with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University. Her writings and exhibitions explore how nature is staged and imagined in times of crisis. She is a 2025 CApE fellow.