“I want to make a closet that shuts down its feelings if you get too close”

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Place: Teksin Talo (i.e. “House of Text” in Finnish), Helsinki
Total running time: ~120 hours

A screen displays a chaotic wirlwind of words: a fragmented collage of different texts, by many authors.
Everything is generated in real time. The excerpts are picked and displayed randomly. The words move so fast, there’s so many of them, and the composition, font size and style varies so much that it’s literally unreadable from afar.
This is not a test of skill, however – it’s an unwinnable, pointless game. If the viewer comes closer, the wirlwind stops. A proximity sensor detects movement and will shut everything if anyone gets close enough. There’s no more text, no movement, only a mysterious (or meaningless) static pair of words: ‘businessman salad’.
If the viewer leaves, the wirlwind resumes.

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Performance

This “closet” is a companion piece to a performance made for the 2024 Outside Art Festival.
The software used in the performance was repurposed for this installation.
For more information on the performance, see this page.

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Credits

This software was built by Isaque Sanches, and features audio recordings by Gonçalo Guiomar.
The manuscipt is a procedural collage of texts by people identifying as LGBTQ+, including the author himself. They are…

Ana Lopes — Antti M. — Maria Giraldes — Rhea Nebgen
Tiago Sanches — “aasci” — “Cystyr” — “EOLOS”
“hallaghan” — “Quendera” — “Tekuno”

…and other people who requested to remain anonymous.
The subjects’ thoughts were collected for this exact purpose, and with their consent, through live interviews, essay-writing, journal-writing, surrealist-style cadavre exquis, etc.

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Context

The installation was accompanied by the following text:

Why ‘businessman salad’? Does it mean anything? Should it mean anything?
The two words seem unrelated. Why not another random pair? Maybe that’s the point: ‘businessman’ and ‘salad’ could be two entities, two different people even. A salad, as an image, seems trivial and inoffensive. A businessman evokes an opposite baggage: hierarchy, prestige, power, subjugation. A businessman gives and takes. A salad is just a salad.

Whatever, whoever, is this businessman salad, it’s always hidden, incomprehensible, forever weird, exotic and out of reach — if someone gets closer, it hides, it closes itself. Maybe they are of two genders: the ‘man’ part of businessman betrays its maleness; is a salad more female, somehow?
They could also be two personas, one hidden, the other exposed. If they are two people, one of them, the salad, should at least be healthy, light, positive, fresh, and so on. The other one, the hidden one, could be as grotesque as it needs to be. Or could it be the other way around? Is the mask the macho manly bro dude in a suit, and the fragile fruity vegetable thing the real one, the one that must hide to survive.
It’s impossible to know. The answer to the first two questions, then, are: no, it shouldn’t mean anything, and as such: no, it probably doesn’t.

Ignorable gibberish, most likely. All of it probably written by equally ignorable people. If we can’t understand any of it, why should we care?