The tongue is a little member, but boast of great things

2 channel video, 4 channel sound, projectors, speakers, pine, plexiglass, wall plaster, oak, metal, chewing gum. Voices by Kenneth Constance, Saleen Gomani and Valeriia Weinrub
Dimensions variable. Animation, sound 11:55 min (loop)
2022


At the corner outside Handelsbanken’s headquarters, the sidewalk is broader than usual. It creates a square-like space, where modern public benches are installed facing the sightseeing boats leaving for the archipelago. With their backs to the display windows in Handelsbanken’s façade, the benches are crouched down, like a bent knee waiting for a sitter.

The building makes up the edge of the site, the scenography of a theatre playing out behind the people watching the scenic view. Tv-screens are installed in the banks’ windows, with glass sandblasted in a pattern of stripes, like a barcode. Inside, a twenty-first-century office is visible with white laminate tabletops on aluminium table legs. The screens silently project their light out on the pavement.

This site is the point of departure for the work, along with a text called the Dialogue of the Exchequer, written approximately in 1180. In it, a master explains to his disciple how the economic system works by describing the tax court of the king.

The scene of the Exchequer is set around a table covered with a chequered cloth. The officials sitting there each have a part to play in the drama. Their hands move objects over the surface, giving new meaning to the counters depending on their placement. The text repeatedly warns that the one explaining this system could easily retreat into a cryptic language, sealing of any possibility of understanding.

An etching from ca. 1490 of the Exchequer serves as the model for the animation The tongue is a little member, but boast of great things. The Dialogue of the Exchequer is used as the script, reworked and chopped up.

“It is a pleasure to play the fool”