Roysdon's work encompasses art-making, choreography, curating, writing, and organizing. Sense and Sense is part of her ongoing exploration of how political movements are represented, which hinges on a broad understanding of choreography as organized movement. Roysdon is interested in "the way an idea of 'free movement' and people demonstrating comes to be represented by an abstraction and in turn comes to represent the idea of the city." For this piece, she collaborated with the performance artist MPA, whose work examines the social and political implications of the body in space.
MPA lays on her side and mimics walking, her body pressed to the ground, through Stockholm's buzzing central square, Sergels Torg, a historical site of countless political demonstrations. Her physical struggle to move in a manner that appears easy and uninhibited recalls the utopian ideals embedded in the site, which was planned to accommodate political protests. In this way, Sense and Sense prompts passersby to compare their everyday movement in the iconic square to the history of political movements galvanized there since its construction in 1967.
Gallery label from Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions, June 11–September 28, 2014.
