M HKA Ensembles

Book, 18 cm x 12 cm, 97 p, language: Swedish, publisher : Albert Bonniers Förlag, ISBN 91-0-010004-8.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2025/986).

**Literary synopsis** The artists Lisa Jonasson and Andjeas Ejiksson say about their first meeting that “sometimes you know that the next meeting will be important. In an attempt to get rid of your loneliness you just decide that the next person must make a difference.” They decided to write and not to speak. They sat next to each other in front of a computer and pushed the keyboard between them. They were not looking for a main thread, but let the text be shaped by the limitations of its emergent structure. Toward the end, they no longer followed each other’s whims, but text’s. A man and a woman meet and become one. It is a rather worn-out metaphor, but in this case the meeting develops into a text. A love story that becomes an investigation – of themselves and their identities – but soon everything is overshadowed by the question of the text’s identity. “Now, we call ourselves I” is how the story begins, and the ego is the text that has become a subject that tells itself. **Relation of the novel to the artist’s practice** *Texten* is the outcome of a very close collaboration, so intimate that that the authorship of the book belongs not to the artists but to the text itself. Lisa Jonasson and Andjeas Ejiksson didn't really choose to write a novel. They tried all sorts of formats and expressions until the text was the only path possible to travel. *“We gave in; it swallowed us and left us to ourselves on the other side. At the time of writing, this was not only our practice, but our lives”*. [More](http://www.albertbonniersforlag.se/Bocker/Svensk-skonlitteratur/T/Texten/)