This project is currently looking for co-producers and tours, and aims to premiere in 2026. If you're interested then please reach out on email and we can meet and talk.

”Thurisaz: Giants, thorns and the othered” is the second work in a series of works about the Nordic runic alphabet ”Elder Futhark”. This series deals with one rune at a time, delving into the themes, lore and symbols that were important for my ancestors on the Nordic land I grew up on and still live on. With this series of work I want to reinterpret this folklore from a queer diasporic and Black perspective, re-understanding what these stories mean to me today.

This second work is currently called ”Thurisaz: Giants, thorns and the othered” and departs from the rune Thurisaz (ᚦ) which translates to ”giant” and later, through Christianity’s erasure of folk tradition, ”thorn”. In Norse Mythology giants were big supernatural beings, they were the enemies of the gods, they were known to bring trouble, be chaotic and evil and they were deeply feared by most people. Many of those ideas about the giants are similar to the prejudice narratives about BIPOCs today. And in this work I’m interested in thinking about the giant as a symbol for the othered and marginalized. Another parallel is the way in which the giants were often not seen, but when they were seen they were larger than cities and sometimes planets. Which is similar to how marginalized people also are made invisible at times and hyper-visible at other times in oppressive ways.

I’m also interested in the stories about Ymir. Ymir was the first giant in Norse Mythology, and it was also Ymir’s body that later became ”the earth, the heaven and everything in between”. Ymir was an intersex being, and like Ymir, many giants possess powers connected to nature. Some giants could shapeshift, some could reshape landscapes, and some could change the atmospheric temperature and turn water to ice.

Through this work I want to reinterpret these Nordic stories about the giants. The giants were beings who took care of nature and the seasons, they had immense sensitivity. The relationship between the gigantic and the so-very sensitive and soft is something I’d like to explore in this work, as well as the dualisms of invisibility vs hyper-visibility, real vs fictive, and fact vs myth.

Currently I’m imagining having the audience sitting on a few islands spread throughout the room. The floor is covered with soil. Big fabric screens (5-10 m2) that evoke billboards or concert video projections are stretched in different places in the room; one in the ceiling, one leaned against a wall, one smaller on Thurisaz / Adam Seid Tahir 3 adamseidtahir@gmail.com

the floor. On the screens are live projections of very zoomed-in videos of the performer’s body. One screen shows one of the performer’s feet, one shows their face. Everything is expanded 10 times in size, giving the feeling of seeing a giant’s hand emerging behind a mountain. The performer moves slowly and softly in a sparsely lit room, almost never fully seen. So as an audience member one sees the performer’s body mostly in fragments on these screens and rarely in flesh. The body becomes a mountain, slowly overtaking the whole space with a contradictory softness. Body becomes room, and the room becomes body. A foot gripping the floor leaving 20 meter long marks behind in the soil.