99% unknown

Directed by: Tilde Björfors
Premiere: 2004

Circus and research meet in part 1 of Tilde Björfors’s trilogy

About 99% Unknown

There are nerves dangling from the rig.
Anaemic Agility Queen slides through the intestinal tract.
Juggling with body fluids.
Acrobatics to the flesh tones of a vocal cord orchestra.
Artists balance on neurons, hang on to DNA strands, hurl themselves into an adrenaline rush and are rewarded with endorphins.
But who exactly is the stem cell, the world's foremost magician?

We dove into the body with a thousand questions:
What makes me dare what I do not dare?
Is my self in my DNA?
Where in the body are our thoughts visible?
How do neurons communicate?
What is physical intelligence?

We learned a lot:
The surface of the lung is as large as four soccer pitches.
A virus attacks in the same way that Napoleon prepared for war.
Each cell has the basic structure of a big city.
But the more we learned, the less we understood. Our humility
in the face of the body’s inexhaustible magic just keeps growing.

What do we really know?

The more we learned, the less we understood. Even though research has taken us so far, what we know about the body remains 99% unknown. Our humility in the face of the body's inexhaustible magic just keeps growing. And who exactly is the stem cell – the world's foremost magician?