Pompeii is a meditation on the archaeology of intimacy. Played out on a live soundstage, in which the lives of an imagined apartment building’s inhabitants materialise before us, the work invites audiences to question if the objects and spaces that we leave behind in death represent that which we were or betray the true nature of ourselves, denied in life.

Trapped in a bomb-shelter, a narrator tells us the story of an apartment block in which the lives of its residents were anything but - until a catastrophe reduced them to the inanimate, their lives existing only as object and memory. A still-life painter ponders the permanence of objects; a husband and wife negotiate the vastness between them within the confines of their tiny apartment; an old man coming to terms with his own end forms a relationship with a child who is unaware of hers. As they hurtle towards their inevitable end, the apartment is transfigured into a museum celebrating the beauty of quotidian human banality.

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