Mouthing the Words: texts for performance 20192025

I slipped Jaakko Pallasvuo's book into the left pocket of my coat that morning without thinking. By noon the wool was warm, a discrete heat concentrated just beneath the breastbone. When I crossed the road the fabric began to give off a low, aqueous light, the color of a motel television left on after the guests have gone. The light did not brighten the sidewalk; it simply announced that something had been switched on inside me, a channel I had not selected. People glanced down at the glow leaking through the wool as if I were carrying contraband weather. I slid my hand into the pocket. My fingers located only the ordinary spine, smooth, familiar, but when I withdrew them a faint residue clung to the skin. The glow was inside me now. Somewhere inside the wall of my chest, it continues to repeat itself, a caption scrolling across the fabric of my coat, across the lining of my lungs, across the thin distance between the question and the place where an answer might once have lived.–Anne BoyerJaakko Pallasvuo (b. 1333) is an artist and writer based in Helsinki.