On the screen we see the interior of an old log cabin, a part of a vanished Swedish culture. There’s a faded photograph on the wall of a man and a woman. We assume they are previous occupants of this space. In the background a fire crackles and a grandfather clock tick-tocks the passing of time. In the middle of the scene we see a dark-haired woman sitting behind a table in solitude. In front of her are tortillas, beans and salsa, the most basic ingredients of a Mexican taco. You might have eaten a taco before, but this is far from fredagsmys, far from hardshells and Santa Maria. This is what’s left when you peel away the layers until you reach that layer that can no longer be peeled without reaching another concept, something that needs another name. What’s left at this point is the essence of an identity.

She starts preparing her taco in silence. You are invited to join. She is extending, through the screen, her sense of the world. You will be eating what she is eating, will be tasting what she is tasting. You are invited to close a distance. However, our senses are affected by our expectations. Previous memories and experiences inform and distort our perceptions of the world. This results in a permanent gap that can never be closed.

The taco she is sharing with you is an attempt to reassemble her world, to recreate what was lost when she came here. It’s an attempt of asserting her belonging to a place, a people, and heritage, of affirming her new culture, community and customs. She sits there as a foreigner, as a borderless nation, drawing invisible lines around herself, defining herself as Mexican, nourished by estrangement. She looks unfamiliar here. But given enough time the cabin’s identity will fold itself around hers until it becomes part of the gap, the space in which nothing is solid or clearly distinguishable, into a state of permanent ephemerality. Then something new has been created. Something which needs another name.

You can be part of it.