Luna Scales (LS) in conversation with curator Theodor Ringborg (TR).
TH: Perhaps we could start with you saying something about your artistic practice and interests?
LS: Working with the video media, I am interested in using the camera and using myself in front of it to document a moment of presence, and through a quiet motion image, to create an intimate, vulnerable, and strong sense of existence in front of the camera and the spectator. The camera is for me an equally present entity as myself, during the recording of my videos. The camera represents an objectifying and alienating stare. I put myself in front of that gaze to act as a figure that not only represents, but investigates its identity as being a woman having a disability.
TH: The text in the film we are showing at Bonniers Konsthall comes from Danish authorities’ assessment of you. Could you say something about that process?
LS: The report was written in 2013 by a physiotherapist and a social worker from a Danish disability organization. The text describes my physical ability – or lack thereof. It caters to the Danish authorities and is used when I’m applying for specific additional expenses, or general financial support for people who are born with permanently reduced functional capacity. The full report is eight pages, whereas three of the pages describes my functions, that’s the part that I’ve used in the video.
TH: It’s as if you are twice exposed given that you are nude as well as “uncovered” by the text. Many people would not dare to reveal themselves like that. It makes me think that, for you, there is something urgent behind the piece?
LS: It became urgent for me do deal with the report, since I’ve been refusing to read it in its full length until 2017, four years after it was written. The need to exhibit the text and depict my body was primarily about taking myself out of the text, even though it describes my body and instead be able to read the text for what it is – a description of a non-abled body that is seen in the light of a ”normal” well-functioning body and is thereby an alienated.
The process of taking myself out of the text began with having it translated from Danish to English, it created a distance that made it easier to read when it wasn’t my mother tongue. I removed my own name from the text, so I instead became “she”, and also the name of my diagnosis.
In the beginning I was a bit insecure if I was “allowed” to remove anything from the original text but doing that made me realize how the text is more about the language and the gaze that is created on the non-abled body, rather than my own body. It was a bigger challenge for me to display the text rather than my naked body.
The female nude model and the non-abled body may traditionally seem like each other’s aesthetic contradictions but acting as the images of the nude model and telling a story of a “weak” body described in the text, I see a lot of similarities and commonness in the consideration of these two, in the fact that they are both subjected to strong objectification.
I wish to evoke a recital and gaze at the traditional nude posing female figure, and then to change and merge that view into a staring at the dis-abled body, as the text unfolds in the video.
