Tanja Nis-Hansen, The Script

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U U U U U U

You are stuck in the train again.
Dressed as a priest.
Dressed as a happy little pig.
Dressed as a pile of leaves.
Dressed in a wig.

And you are out to entertain again.
Longing for the thrills, clenching of the jaws.
Looking for a way to pay the bills, looking for applause.

And you still see an old dead man when you look into the bathroom mirror.
Every morning you say hi, the concealer hides it well.
Waky-up vagina eyes. Seems like no one else can tell.

So you are stuck in the train again.
Longing for a loving hand in yours.
Not just a living hand in yours.
Someone who would slightly fumble with your DNA.
Someone who could make genetic trouble go away

B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U U U U U U

You are in a dark room.
A strange womb - not your mother’s.
You are a cyst on a young woman’s ovary.
Cell changes in her book of poetry.
You are suspicious shadows on a screen of codes.
You are the aggressor in a battle between good and evil nodes.

A moment of dwelling, a morbid swelling.
And most of all you are a fortune telling.

Inflamed, infested, nasty, toxic, deadly, destructive, fatal, infective,
dirty, cancerous, radioactive, filthy, mortal and sore.
You are all this to me and much more.

Mutants arise by mutation.
Are all your worries caused by errors of a D N A replication?

Your body is in trouble.
Other bodies too.
Who can feel the aching?
No one else but you.

U V A - U V B.
You are a sick person - You will see.

Was it something you did? Or was it something you said?
Guilt and disease they come in pairs, they multiply and spread.

Hours of sunbeams on a vampire’s skin,
that calls for trouble and so it begins.
Sex partners without protection,
that calls for further inspection.
And the years that you smoked just to relax,
it was all for free while it lasted,
but when do you have to pay that motherfucking tax?

The toxins you inhaled while painting inside your little cavity,
will transform your inside into a dark masterpiece.
Imagine a medieval depiction of suffering,
the fresco flatness,
the doctor’s retrieval of information,
is lacking highlights and gloss.
And you - you lack information.
No horizon.
Explicit figuration.
covered in pacifying ornamentation.
It is like - bearable suffering,
In a flat form,
on a flat screen,
in a flat landscape.

Look at Bruegel closely - look at Bosch as well.
Sinful humanity, perfectly positioned,
somewhere between heaven and hell.
Dreadful cosmology or a hermetic spell,
a pattern that is orchestrated pretty damn well.

Like many malicious entities together can make a pretty composition.
Many round shadows on an ultrasound screen calls for suspicion.

Are you still wondering how to cope with an enclosed envelope?
Bad news, bad news – it is the result from another endoscope.
Blood tests testing you.
Another funny deja vu.
And now you have to follow through.

Get in touch with the barbarian within.
Release your fears.
Accept the fact that you had more than enough,
and now it ends in tears.
Generations of overconsumption
lead the mind to tricky assumptions.

fatty, festive, overindulging, laughing, smoking peers.
it’s stored in your body as clutter and dirt - all those careless years.

You are a cell without inhibitions.
You are the daughter of cell change traditions.
You know better than all the physicians.
Why don’t they listen to all your suspicions?
You grind your teeth; you call out his name.
You count your birthmarks in fear.
You were born in this corrupted frame.
30 years old and no one to blame.
You are a teenage mutant, dear.

– Excerpt of the text by Tanja Nis-Hansen from performance Teenage Mutant (2019-2024)

Produced at Druckwerkstatt im Kulturwerk des BBK Berlin
Courtesy of the artist and Sans titre, Paris