The Last Dreams, 2026

10 min 20 s. Costume made by me, Participant singing – Enrico Rossi

The video consists of me reading a text I’ve written followed by Enrico Rossi singing Lascia chío pianga. Since the text is in Swedish I will write it here: “It was a late spring evening. The last rays of sunlight cast long spears through the tall birches of Sörfors. They lay crisscrossed across the fields like a civil war. But the fields had paid them no attention. They had lain there, ploughed and rolling, waiting for an outbreak. Waiting for their summer screams. People said they looked damp and promising. Almost enough to hope. The shoots had not appeared yet. They could still have been nothing more than farmland. But if you lay down in a furrow, you could find flakes of skin from strong hands. Some had taken them home that evening. Shown them to their parents and told them about a new friend who must have gotten lost beneath the soil. In the antique shop Opal, where paintings crowded together in gilded frames and visitors could never quite resist touching each other’s faces of wood and porcelain, a rumor had begun to spread. One evening, when the slightly weary and frail man who was slowly disappearing beneath his growing estate of the dead—otherwise known as the antique shop Opal—opened the last box of the day, he pulled out the first pair of earmuffs. At once, he understood that something had gone wrong. Because the first earmuffs were covered in tiny flakes of skin, much softer than the ones his daughter had found out in the fields. He put on the earmuffs in secret, ashamed of his life’s work. Yet he was pulsing with the same curiosity that had always been the foundation of the little antique shop Opal. Suddenly, the earmuffs began to crackle. And his heart began to pound. And in the panic and the anxiety, in the words that never seemed honest, in the thoughts that tangled every feeling together until they smothered it, in the life choices never made, in the decisions he had tormented and punished himself for, in the years spent looking inward, in the feeling of never, ever being enough, and in the ulcers he had planted inside his daughter by always seeming so distant and withdrawn, and in the friends who no longer called, and in the dreams he had never quite dared believe in, and which therefore slowly died as well— from the earmuffs, the ones that had been the first, the ones that had always been hard and cold, yet somehow orange or blue— from the earmuffs came a song. A song in a language he recognized and had once danced to when he was young and in love. A song whose words, though indistinct, were melodic as raspberry bushes and passionate as wild rapids or fields of lupines. It was a song about a life that might have been his own. A life that had gone out in order to live forever among the soil and those flakes of skin, beneath the shadows and the sun. A song that made him shiver, that made him sob, and finally feel. The rumor that spread that evening concerned a nearby cave. It was whispered that beneath its trickling waters and sunbathing salmon, on a late spring evening, something had awakened. Someone who was now singing of suffering and of love for humankind. Someone who sang, if only for a first and final time. Someone who, still, chose to sing.”