Your Health Centre — Your Heart

The core of the project was that the entire Landskrona Town Hall was transformed into a temporary health centre called “Your Health Centre Your Heart”. But this was no ordinary healthcare facility — rather a surreal, interactive experience where the boundaries between reality and art dissolved. The audience booked an appointment via the project's website, arrived at the town hall, and were received in the entrance in exactly the same way as at a regular health centre. There, however, realism ended and the artistic work began.

In the treatment rooms, “patients” met functionally diverse actors portraying characters where the exclusion that usually constitutes an obstacle in everyday life was instead turned into a strength in artistic form. Visitors were drawn into a series of scenarios where horror scenes and nightmares mingled with shimmering, beautiful rooms and experiences. The experience was dynamic and unpredictable — exactly what happened depended partly on what each visitor brought with them in terms of expectations, fears and experiences.

What set this work apart from traditional theatre was the pervasive interactivity. The audience were not passive spectators but became full participants — they put on hospital clothes and were sent between different consultation rooms that had been furnished with medical equipment from different decades.

Gökägget AB worked during 2023 in parallel on two major art installations: “The Health Centre” and “A Midsummer Night's Dream”. Both projects were very well received and received a great deal of positive feedback from the public. The company has expressed that they plan to continue creating several exciting art installations in the future, with the aim that the works will evoke emotions, reflections and resonance in the viewer.

The Health Centre was produced under the company Gökägget AB. The project received financial support from Kulturbryggan — a part of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee under the programme Artistic Renewal, which works to support art forms that have never before been done in Sweden and are thus unique.

The National Association for Social and Mental Health (RSMH) in Lund contributed five members to the performance. These people, aged 57 to 81, had diagnoses including Asperger's, autism, Tourette's syndrome and schizophrenia. For them, participation became an opportunity to talk about who they are on their own terms.

Lena Forsheden from the same association acted as chief physician with the right to both ask strange questions and prescribe peculiar treatments. This role allocation — where people who are otherwise at a disadvantage in the healthcare system were given the highest authority — was the core of the work's norm-critical message.

The performance received media attention even before the premiere. Landskrona Direkt published a preview article on 2 February 2023 in which Emelie Carlsson Gras presented the project and its vision. The newspaper Helsingborgs Dagblad also covered the event with an article about how the town hall was converted into a health centre in the unique theatre project.

POPiNTV, a local media channel, visited the performance and produced video reports that were shown on their platform. Radio Malmöhus visited The Health Centre and broadcast live from the town hall for a couple of hours. Sydnytt produced a report on the performance.

The magazine Revansch, a publication from the National Association for Social and Mental Health, published a detailed review in its April 2023 issue. Reviewer Jenny Wickeberg gave a detailed account of her own visit as a patient.

The project has become an important example of how art can be used as a tool for social criticism and to lift perspectives that are otherwise rarely heard in public. By turning the power relations in a healthcare setting upside down, and allowing people with functional variations and mental illness to assume the roles of authorities, the performance created a unique platform for reflection on norms, power and health.

“Your Health Centre Your Heart” places itself in a tradition of Swedish performance art and interactive theatre that explores the relationship between artist, work and audience. With its site-specific format — where the entire town hall became the stage — it connects to international currents within immersive theatre, where the boundaries between reality and fiction dissolve.

The project also functions as a model for how artistic productions can be created with and by people with functional variations. Instead of these groups being objects for others' stories, here they were subjects and narrators of their own stories. The collaboration between professional cultural actors and various user organisations created a structure where everyone's voices were heard.

Through the film and the digital platform, the work lives on even after the physical performances have ended. The project's website offers opportunities for screenings with or without conversations with the directors, allowing the work to reach new audiences and continue raising discussions about health, norms and power in society.