work of art

I'm a work of art. Or well, I'm part of a work of art. The Swedish artist Linda Tedsdotter has made a light and sound installation that is to be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. She's made these simple boxes that you stick your head into. In the boxes you meet a lamp. Not a blinding lamp, but light therapy. Light. We Scandinavians need more light for sure. And another need we have is more love. I think everybody needs more love. These boxes provide that too - in headphones. There's a different voice in every box bombarding you with compliments, admiration - love. I'm one of the voices.

I was asked to talk lovingly - in English - to strangers that stick their heads into light boxes at a museum (The other boxes speak Swedish). But that's not what you must think of when you're stuck in the soundproof box in the recording studio with a microphone. For the twenty minutes I talked into that microphone, it was the images of loved ones I saw before me. Current love. Old love. Family. Friends. People around me I simply admire. Beauty within my loved ones. Beauty I miss. Beauty I see every time I close my eyes. And I described how I see that beauty to the microphone. But without the most specific specifics. I told it about magic eyes and contagious smiles. I told it of sense of style and my own warm and fuzzy feelings.

I think those twenty minutes loving a microphone was as much love therapy to me as it ever will be to all those strangers coming to be loved by me when they stick their head into a box.

This exhibition starts at Feb 18 at Moderna Museet