The Giant Clam, 2020

Domestic reading performance (Swe/Eng) with clam sculpture, meringues, foam and fog

The Inner Ocean: The Giant Clam is a reading performance that took place in my apartment in the residential area Seved in southern Malmö. Dressed in a giant mussel mantle made of blue silk fabric, acrylic paint and various kinds of plastic, I sat in the sofa, stood in the bedroom and laid in the bathtub while reading texts from Seaweedsbladet # 1 – a newspaper I made in 2017 that was distributed to 3500 households in Seved.

“There is a membrane between the internal organs of a giant clam and the hard calcareous shell. The membrane is called the mantle and it’s here – between the hard that encloses the soft, pearls evolve. When I wear the mantle, my body becomes the soft interior of the mussel and the bathtub becomes the hard shell. The apartment’s concrete walls forms the structure that the clam reside in. The hot water from the tap, that rise and fall as I fill up the tub, is the tide. When I have finished bathing, I rise from the foam, just like Aphrodite.”

The Giant Clam belongs to The Inner Ocean – a multi-part project embracing the fact that I love to swim. The project’s title refers to the fluid that encloses mature egg cells in all land-living animals. The liquid has the same salinity as the primal ocean once had – the sea where the first life once arose, several billion years ago.

The performance was part of Sensing Nature From Within, Moderna Museet Malmö, 2020.