I got asked by Andersson Dance Company to produce a poster image for their new production Mössan, a piece by choreographer Örjan Andersson based on a story by Thomas Bernhard, premiering at Dansens Hus Stockholm. The colour palette was already decided: a sustained, saturated pink. The direction was monochromatic and obstructed — a gaze partially denied, the face present but not fully given.
We worked in studio and found a mirror there. We decided to break it into pieces and shoot the subject through the fragments, holding them at different angles in front of the face. What you get is a face that is simultaneously present and fractured: multiple partial reflections, none of them complete. The pink light saturated everything and the broken glass caught it differently in each shard.
It felt right for the piece. Mössan is based on Thomas Bernhard, whose work is preoccupied with obsession, repetition, and the distorted relationship between a person and their own image of themselves. A broken mirror is exactly that: the self refracted, never whole, always slightly wrong. The face is there. The gaze is there. But neither is entirely available.
