Mercedes Mühleisen: Mayflies are dozing in your hair

The author’s text explores the theme of postpartum psychosis and its visionary potential. It is based on the direct experience of the artist, who through an imaginative play with language connects contemporary social attitudes towards motherhood with personal feelings of anxiety arising from the dissolving boundaries of the body and the individual ego of the new mother. Autobiographical elements and her own hallucinations intermingle with the voices of medieval scientists and contemporary visionaries, human and animal senses dissolving and sticking together like flakes in porridge. The fluid description is so sensory that we can still smell the damp scent in a dark corner of the forest for a while after reading. 

Mercedes Mühleisen is a Norwegian visual artist and poet. She works with video, sculpture, installation, and performance, which she combines and presents in the form of three-dimensional staged images. In her work she often uses her own original and dramatized texts with serious and subversive content. In recent years, her work has been influenced by an interest in the non-human. She attempts to find language and expression for processes that lie outside of anthropocentric logic, letting previously neglected voices be heard. It also explores how language and its laws shape reality, either as a limiting factor or as a possibility for creating new understandings of reality. In her works, she lets a pool of water speak to the person looking into it; she captures the process of dying through organisms that continue to live in a dead body and writes speeches on minerals. 

Sample text:

A little weasel sips rainwater
from the forgotten cup on the porch
When you open the door, it runs inside
cocks its head and says:

Is there a child?
There is a child
And it's yours

 From now on you are a breeding animal 
You belong among the animals
Mother is mixing you all together
like milk in milk

This is primeval, present, future
In the same body
In the same night

Your thoughts spread outward across the forest floor
Far too far, far too wide 

Stones rise and spin 
while your dread is carried bundled over the trees

Poke a hole in the night
with your strongest finger
Let the darkness flow toward you
The words slip by
like fish

The whole text can be downloaded here.