Perspective

This writing exercise is based on an exhibition by Lea Gulditte Hestelund at Overgaden in 2018, and the Olga Ravn’s subsequent novel, The Employees.

The Cleaner

I overheard someone calling it a Minion. I see it now. It’s the colour and shape, the oval of the omeprazole capsules that Hamid takes for his irritated belly. I think it’s more like a halter. A donkey’s halter, in pale yellow, slipper soft leather. It’s for a human head, not a donkey’s, and that’s creepy. We don’t know it’s for a human head but that’s my best guess. It isn’t fitted over a head, just a clear perspex dome. I don’t like it, especially at five in the morning when there’s nobody about. The lower straps would cover a person’s mouth. Even a donkey’s mouth is let free. Minions are creepy too, the way they get about all together dressed the same with their deranged eyes and their tilted mocking laughs. I overheard the shift manager calling us minions in the tearoom. He thought I wouldn’t understand. Or maybe he knew exactly. He was picking his nose when he said it. I was emptying the coffee machine. Pushing the damp dark grains into the food compost bin and breathing in the thick woody scent. He flicked the snot onto the floor. The artist came in one day. A string of people followed her in white gloves. She asked me about cleaning her object. Did I use the little brush I’d been provided with? She blinked a lot when she spoke and looked over my shoulder. Then she thanked me for my work and gave me a paper bag of croissants on her way out. One of them’s half eaten, she said, you can throw it away if you like, I won’t be offended.

The Security Guard

They don’t know how long to stand in front of it without moving on to the next one. They look about to see who’s looking. But they all stand longer in front of this one than the others. Especially the women. They frown when they look at it and they touch their lips with their sparkling painted nails. One of them actually started crying. Dabbed her eyes with a tissue she pulled out of her handbag then tried to hand it to me to put in the bin. There’s no bins in here, she said, sweeping the tissue around the curve of the gallery with a tanned bare arm. So where I am supposed to find one then, I didn’t say. Actually, it’s my favourite piece in the exhibition. It doesn’t have a name none of them do. It’s definitely for prisoners, for women likely given the colour. They would use black on men. Or grey. Must be to gag them. Some of them need gagged right enough. But not like that. Women are right to stick up for their rights. Reckon its something to do with that cancel culture. Everything is these days. No one out protesting yet but they’ll be here sure as day turns to night and night to day. Last exhibition they were all out screaming and chanting and throwing coloured flour about the place. Half of them with purple hair. Or green. Rings in their noses. The other half older men in suits with pink frothing faces and jowls laddering down their necks. Even got my picture in the news trying to keep them apart. My mother cut the piece out of the newspaper and pressed it between two old magazines. The headline said Choreographed Cancel Culture. What does it mean? my mother asked. She’s proud of me, my mother.

The Woman Visitor

I’ve been three times now and I can’t stop staring. I want to reach inside the case and touch it the way you’d check a lump on the back of your neck to see whether it’s growing or not. It’s leather, the colour of October oak leaves. If I say bondage would you think less of me? But bondage is wrong – it’s not dominatrix stuff. It’s a silencer. Allows her to see but not to speak. Allows her to sniff but not to yawn. Why do I think it’s for a woman? The artist is a woman. She’s telling us about women being silenced. Or she’s doing the silencing. One woman silencing another. Does she want to silence her, the artist? Of course. You only have to look at Twitter. Women rounding on each other like serpents. Trolling and wounding. The strap that goes up over the head that keeps the whole thing in place has long slim pockets. You could keep pencils in those pockets, coloured and sharp or blunt black, the harness comes with no explanation no instructions. What do they let her do, we wonder? What does she draw with the pencils that she cannot say out loud?

The Student

Look at that one over there. The amber one with studs. Studs have more than one meaning. Take your pick. That’s a head alright. Empty-headed. The straps must cover the mouth. Unless you turn it round. But what would be the point of that? How do they know if it’s on too tight? Hannibal Lechter didn’t state a preference for colour but if he had he would have picked scarlett November for the metal taste he left on her tongue. Behind, at the back of the head, there’s a thronged strap, pigtail length, fringed at the end, a grabber for the controller. How we scream at those old movies with the fringed leather jackets on the boys that strut their stuff puffed up preening themselves in car windows while wiping yellow shite off their shoes. The studs that keep the whole thing together are not neat, people are not neat, they are rowdy when pricked antagonised demonised anonymised why waste time with neat when you’re trying to buckle them up.

The Object

We are here for you to relate to our bodies in many different forms and positions – bodies that may seem strange to you. Through spatial staging, the artist enters the viewer’s own body, thereby adding an additional layer of experience to the exhibition’s theme. We hold our secrets behind the tamped skins of pigs and spit inward the moment you move on.