Jaakko Pallasvuo: Mouthing the Words: texts for performance 2019–2025
New In Town (2024) by Jaakko Pallasvuo & Teo Ala-Ruona
Mouthing the Words consists of texts written to be performed. Sometimes this means a text written as the initial component to a theatrical production. Sometimes a text has been written to be spoken by someone without much other splendour. The words exist to be said, sung or put into action.
The texts collected in this book have been written by Jaakko Pallasvuo for Amnesia Scanner, Teo Ala-Ruona and Maria Metsalu, among others. The words have been uttered in theaters, performance venues and contemporary art institutions in Berlin, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Tallinn, London, et cetera.
Collecting these texts in book form strips them of their original context while placing them in parallel with each other. A thread runs through them. A thread across time and space. Words are so thin they can resist all this entropy and erosion for a while. Why is there an inkling that all these texts might be one text? This book is, possibly, the slow emergence of three quarters of one idea. In an ideal scenario perceiving this idea taking shape is beautiful and thrilling.
Jaakko Pallasvuo (b. 1333) is an artist and writer based in Helsinki.
I slipped Jaakko Pallasvuo's book into the left pocket of my coat that morning without thinking. By noon the wool was warm, a discrete heat concentrated just beneath the breastbone. When I crossed the road the fabric began to give off a low, aqueous light, the color of a motel television left on after the guests have gone. The light did not brighten the sidewalk; it simply announced that something had been switched on inside me, a channel I had not selected. People glanced down at the glow leaking through the wool as if I were carrying contraband weather. I slid my hand into the pocket. My fingers located only the ordinary spine, smooth, familiar, but when I withdrew them a faint residue clung to the skin. The glow was inside me now. Somewhere inside the wall of my chest, it continues to repeat itself, a caption scrolling across the fabric of my coat, across the lining of my lungs, across the thin distance between the question and the place where an answer might once have lived.
–Anne Boyer
