17.10.22, New York.

“… I’ll walk there, take my clothes off, put the shirt on and it begins, with their eyes looking at me, my body moves etc.”

(excerpt from score, horse 2)

horse 2 was scored and performed during the residency programme, MRX, at Movement Research, New York. The residency was funded by The Swedish Arts and Grants Committe.

Videographer: Mackenna Finch

transcript: (00:00-02:01)

The image of him she has from when he was a boy, to when he is lying there in the hospital bed, is eroded again and again until that last Sunday, when she sits by his side.

Martha takes her son's hand, looks at it, the one that used to be smaller than hers, the slender fingers that could fit in the palm. J. used to dig his nails into the wrinkled skin in the evenings when they sat on the sofa and watched black and white movies. And he's doing it now too, or trying to. He is too weak and the only thing that can be felt against the mother's skin are light, pulsating pressures that eventually subside completely.

On her way home from the hospital with the box full of clothes her son J., his name only bearing the letter J., was wearing when he got there, Martha rides through town. Brooklyn Hospital Center on the corner of Ashland and Dekalb, she recalls, just a year ago added Center to its name. Raymond Street Jail was still active until the mid-20th century. In 1963, the prison closed and became the northern third of the Brooklyn Hospital Center. She wonders if the patients in the norther third of the Brooklyn Hospital Center feels any difference with the last third of the name added, or if they still lay there, miserable and dying of disease.

What’s really in a name? Maybe the people running the Mount Sinai Hospital system had read Shakespeare after all.

The train rattles. The brown and yellow seats, covered in the orange plastic smells. Everything smells. She smells. The last few days she just sat there, in that chair. The body thickened…