I Kiss Your Eyes
(A Year in Eight Weeks)
2024
Durational performance, 25 letters, wood structures, pewter, sound, modified pigment prints on cotton paper and voile, satin silk costume, speaker system.
Twenty-five love letters from the beginning of the 20th century, many of them signed with “I Kiss Your Eyes”, are read out loud—one at a time, three days per week—as a durational performance at Bonniers Konsthall. The letters were sent from Fabrikören, a factory owner, artist and pewterer, to Matrosen, a factory worker and sailor who emigrated to America. Over the course of one year, Fabrikören wrote endlessly, full of hope, longing and despair, pleading for redemption. The language is seductively beautiful and seeks to both imagine a shared future with and possess Matrosen. Parts of the correspondence were used as evidence in a 1907 court case in which Fabrikören was charged with ‘fornication against nature’. He was convicted, and given a harsh sentence. The case led to a public debate around the law on homosexuality in Sweden and can be seen as an early sign of attitudes changing.
Inside a wooden structure, which reflects the floorplan and the cardinal points of a room in Fabrikören’s Stockholm apartment, hangs a large textile print based upon a faded photograph of the room and two altered images from his private collection. For each reading, the performers deliver a casting ritual with pewter, before leaving both the letter and a pewter figure on one of the tables placed outside the room structure. The ritual focusses on neither the court case nor the biography of the protagonist. Instead, a new narrative emerges in the present, through the intimacy of the letters and the collective reading ritual whose voices possess the entire building. In the form of recurring public announcements, I Kiss Your Eyes (A Year in Eight Weeks) unfolds a history that is passionate but not heroic, about the complexity of love under controlling social mechanisms.
Original archive photo, National Library of Sweden.