Joanna Bednarczyk: QUANTA

◊ 2024 Golden Stage Cross Award for Best Director – Łukasz Twarkowski ◊ 2024 Golden Stage Cross Award for Best Set Designer – Fabien Lédé ◊ 2024 Golden Stage Cross Award for Best Lighting Designer – Eugenijus Sabaliauskas

Translated from Polish by Vyturys JARUTIS

“Some places are like people: some shine and some don’t” – to quote a classic. The “Les Moires” hotel is the only shining point for many kilometres around. Far from popular tourist trails, it exists as if time did not exist: it does not grow old or young; it simply is. They say that high in the mountains time flows faster, though people cannot notice such differences. Although “Les Moires” itself does not experience time, the lives of its residents speed up compared with what happens closer to the ground. The fact that this acceleration can be observed defies all the laws of classical physics. Minutes and seconds seem more densely packed in time, so that there are more of them in one day and one night than an ordinary clock would measure.

As time accelerates suspiciously, a certain property of the physical world accelerates too—a property that might be called the quanta of events. What does the word “quantum” mean? In Latin, quantum means “how much.” In physics, a quantum describes the smallest amount a physical quantity can have, or the smallest amount by which it can change in a single event. Put simply, a quantum is an indivisible portion. A cake cannot be cut forever. There is a smallest possible piece that can be served to a guest.

Life is made up of event quanta. Events follow one another, lining up into a particular story. A multitude of phenomena, feelings and connections averages out into a narrative, divided into the past, the present and an unknown future. We call this life, biography, fate. Time governs every story; it is what makes stories comprehensible. First comes a cause, then an effect, and action produces reaction. But when time begins to accelerate, it ceases to be time and becomes something whose nature we can no longer understand; the multitude of quantum events stops averaging out into a reality we can comprehend.

This is precisely what happens one summer evening in 1938 at the barely making ends meet “Les Moires” hotel in the Swiss mountains. The properties of physical space and time become disrupted. The hotel’s guests experience the disruption too. Something begins to change in their memories, beliefs, emotions and desires. No one understands what is happening. Among the guests is the famous German physicist Werner Heisenberg, author of the uncertainty principle. Could the reality of large objects, such as a desk, a hotel and mountains, be starting to behave like the reality of elementary particles? According to Heisenberg, we can speak of particles only approximately, describing their states rather than the particles themselves. Only by changing their thinking from “what an object is” to “what state an object is in” can the hotel guests understand what is happening to them and around them. They came to “Les Moires” to look at the world from the perspective of high mountains. In the broad view, to seek a deeper