How are stories told, how are identities constructed, and who is entitled to speak—or to speak for others? Es wird einmal geworden sein (Once upon tomorrow) is a video performance that stages these questions through the story of an elderly woman who lived in seclusion in the forests of Lower Austria – this story is based on true incidents.

Both then and now, the woman persists in local memory as a mystified figure and as a nostalgic emblem of an “original” way of life – without running water or electricity, using a car battery to make light. This image stands in stark contrast to the transformed rural surroundings, now marked by glazed country houses, wind turbines, and SUVs.

The 2-channel video projection is performed on a mobile vehicle, itself powered by a car battery. Conceiving the moving image as a literally “moving” image, the act of storytelling emerges as a performative moment, with the storyteller becoming the protagonist of the story.

By interweaving past and present, oral histories and material remains, reconstruction and first-person narration, Once upon tomorrow collapses documentary and performance into a situated investigation. Story and memory take shape in the interval between projection and place, between individual testimony and collective imagination.