Text by Samra Mayanja

Please try to avoid reading this as a peep into the artist’s life or some hidden meaning in the work. It’s neither. This text was drafted on the train after conversations with Amanda Moström at her studio. The phrase ‘life force’ was where we began.

quiet but
Exuding was never about confidence. The overground is empty but my clothes could antagonise a Sunday crowd. You can call it the libidinous howl from an injured bat, my spirit. We wanted to live beyond suburbia’s offer of rigid sex, a 4 wheel drive and a life without multiple deaths. I am an avoidant, somewhat shy girlie. Not a boomer, as it might seem. My inclination is to say less and cough from my iris. I undress my eyes for contact by simply taking off my glasses. It’s easier that way.

salty but
In an unrealised performance entitled ‘Happy House’ I smile to camera with an apple pie in my hands for the time it takes to grow the grains, mill the flour, rear the cows, yank the milk, churn the butter, grow the apples, assemble the pie and pop it in the oven. The scorching thing lives in those malleable metal dishes and sticks to my skin. My tween self disapproves of all things trad. She sits on my shoulder without a seatbelt.

The kids on the overground sing the Stevie Wonder version of ‘Happy Birthday’ which I learned much too old was for MLK day not a reworking of the trad Happy Birthday song. It’s more important that they’re singing loudly, unpoliced by their parents, than knowing this fact. I sing too. Often by their own admission art critics are bad singers. To sing well, I think, you surrender to the idea that the voice is that part of you that has no limits. My shitty school was filled with critics who found my limitations in everything.

bored but
Leaving suburbia means becoming pretty overnight. Boom. You’re pretty now. Bang. Just like that – I promise you. But, to the dismay of 98% of my friends I am yet to leave the comfort of sleeping with men. I don’t want to. Not that I’m fucking anyways. So to some extent I’m writing from a no culture cul-de-sac where houses don’t touch. I live in the scruffy house on the corner.

Two girls on the overground contemplate having burrata and peaches at a wedding. Not their own. They rate it blah blah. I ignore. There is some hope on the overground, a shy cute looking girl has elf ears and a leather coat and isn’t talking about the money shes made on Vinted like the two huns behind me. Having become a cliche overnight, I can tell you that it does nothing to inspire - which is to say charge up, turn on, enliven, give life…

not sorry but
Sorry girls, I don’t want to make you self-conscious. I’m a hun too. I said, no limits, I said no limits, I said no.

Amanda tells me that a hen broods an egg and then it hatches. We agree that caring automatically, like a hen, sounds enviable. It would silence the bickering between the first two parts of this text. Aged seventeen I would bunk the train to sneak into fashion shows, parties and raves not knowing where I'd sleep. I would jump into cars with people I didn’t know and take bumps on keys. I blacked out twice on a sofa and once in my own bed. I cunt say exactly what happened. But it took a while for danger to factor into my decision making. I’m not saying it was my fault. The real threat was a life spent nowhere where you could only be harmed by people you knew. So I threw myself everywhere, including outside of myself.

In our first conversation Amanda told me about her thoughts on the libido. Later, somewhat turned on, I wondered whether it was the conversation, kissing goodbye, the vibrating train or the prospect of being a mother that has wiped away my fatigue. Sometimes my friends do that. All of them are cackling stallions and most are clowns. We speak this invisible language that tending to dying loved ones or being a second brain in crisis has helped us alphabetise.