i’m a living work of art. it’s killing me. i don’t start getting paid, i don’t think i can make it. i’m not a charity.
olen elävä taideteos. se tappaa minut. ellei joku pian alaa maksaa minulle, en selviä. en ole hyväntekeväisyysjärjestö.

carmen is a novel about a woman who becomes convinced that human bodies are about to lose their value on an unprecedented scale and asks a museum to preserve her as a living work of art.

carmen, the red woman, visits Sammlung Prinzhorn at Heidelberg's psychiatric hospital, a collection of art by psychiatric patients, many of whom later became victims of Nazi medical crimes. Her people, the red, were not allowed in the hospitals until the crimes started.

On her way back to her artist residency, she feels herself beginning to slide out of reality and she collapses on the street. She gets stuck in the birth canal of space and encounters a murder of crows soaring through painted galaxies. Her timeline splits: in one, she lives through dreamlike scenes at a psychiatric hospital; in the other, she returns to the present with enormous effort, only to find her dimension-travel-worn internal organs struggling for life, left to deal with the aftermath of her vision alone.

carmen knows bodies are about to be devalued on a level never seen before, so she asks a museum to assume full responsibility for her care and protection in a letter stating the terms of her stay. What follows is a spiral of obsession, blood and haunted dreamscapes.

carmen, in Latin, means spell, oracle, poem. As the embodiment of transformational language, poet carmen lives in a constant state of dissolution, searching for a form and structure that can hold her.

WHERE TO BUY

Hardcover available at
Kirja.fi / Rosebud / Suomalainen Kirjakauppa / Adlibris

E-book available at
Bookbeat / Suomalainen kirjakauppa / Adlibris

also available in Akateeminen Kirjakauppa physical stores