Who gets to be on the Swedish Krona? Imagine your face on a bank note. Circulating through the pockets of many. I visited the Skogskyrkogården, looking for her grave......
This work has been performed in both Stockholm and Rotterdam as part of Education Program and Performance night. During which I invite an audience to transform me into the Swedish born Hollywood star Greta Garbo, actress during the 1920s and 1930s. I was magnetized to Greta for her promiscuousness and fluid sexuality. Also in the way she embodies multiple emotive states in particular, solumness. Roland Barthes wrote in MYTHOLOGIES about how she has an everyday beauty that transcends through many.
Garbo offered to one's gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the
human creature, which explains why her face is almost sexually
undefined, without however leaving one in doubt.
I was interested in playing a celebrity pre-instantaneous-global-image-distribution in conjunction with being a low-fye drag queen and playing out "femme" to an audience. And most important to the performance was my failure or inability to impersonate or give a true likeness of Greta. And the fact that my make-d up face was being constructed without instructions by many people over an hour....crucially giving over control to produce a collective drawing on a face.
