A Year Without Summer Florentina Holzinger

It is 2025. We are living in a year without a summer. In a terrifying reality that feels like an apocalyptic vision of our world: shrouded in darkness and stripped of all certainty. A world in which survival becomes a ritual and despair dances hand in hand with ecstasy.

In 1816, the original 'year without a summer', the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupts. Ash fills the air, the sun disappears, harvests fail, and the world suffers from hunger. In that same year, eighteen-year-old Mary is staying at Lake Geneva with a group of poets. The storms and the darkness inspire them to tell ghost stories. Mary invents Frankenstein: the story of a scientific genius who tries to bend nature to his will and ultimately succumbs to the monster he has constructed from the body parts of the dead.

Florentina Holzinger and her cast explore the stories we tell about our environment, our bodies, health, decay, and identity. From the 21st-century obsession with a longer life and medical promises to the dangers of unbridled technological advancement in a world shaped by AI, robotics, and bio-engineering, A Year Without Summer appropriates this urge to improve nature to the point of perversion and pits the promise of eternal life against the inevitability of death.

But what happens when creation becomes the monster?

When creation becomes like us?