Rosie Heinrich. We Always Need Heroes

Book excerpt: We construct our reality by telling stories. When faced with something that is inconsistent with our story, we most often find ways to reframe it, construe it to our convenience, or dismiss it. Yet sometimes events take place that differ so profoundly from our story that the entire thing seems in danger of collapsing. When the banking crisis hit Iceland in 2008, the country fell into a deep recession. Its citizens also found themselves in a ?cultural crash?, as their collective reality turned out to be an illusion. Rosie Heinrich constructs a meta-dialogue containing the building blocks of a story that she combines with a tangible cultural landscape: images of sand, clay, lava, rock, and pigment.