Uppsala University

The artist duo Goldin+Senneby are to be artists-in-residence at the Centre for Medical Humanities, Uppsala University. A still from the film Swallow Image, courtesy of MIT List Visual Arts Center.

The artist duo Goldin+Senneby, comprising Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby, will serve as artists-in-residence at the Centre for Medical Humanities, Uppsala University, during the 2026–27 academic year. They will be working on the project Lucs darrningar (Luc’s Tremors), in collaboration with researchers at the university.

During the spring, Goldin+Senneby carried out a mapping project at Uppsala University. With support from Centre for Medical Humanities (CMH), they met with researchers from a range of disciplines to identify potential collaborators ahead of the residency.

“The residency at CMH offers us a fantastic opportunity to deepen a long-term investigation into the politics of diagnosis: how diagnoses emerge, whom they serve, and what they do to the bodies they name,” says Simon Goldin.

The project takes as its starting point Marie-Elisabeth Luc, who served as personal assistant to the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Through Charcot’s systematic study of her tremors, the foundations for the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) were established, and Luc has retrospectively come to be regarded as the first MS patient. Charcot measured and documented Luc’s tremors in a series of records known as “tremograms”.

These tracings, Luc’s tremors etched into soot-blackened paper, are all that remain of her experience of illness. Yet a tremor is not neutral. In Luc’s case, it was the product of a specific social situation: a frail and unwell employee whose body gradually ceased to be a tool of labour and became an object of study. The asymmetry of power was embedded in the measuring apparatus itself. Goldin+Senneby seek to investigate whether Luc’s tremors can be reconstructed from these historical tremograms. What remains of her in this document, and is it possible, at the same time, to restore Luc’s agency and subjectivity?

These questions will be explored in collaboration with Johan Sundström’s research group, which has, among other things, developed an AI model capable of reading and interpreting ECG traces, as well as with Sara Riggare, whose research has involved both recording her own tremors and advancing the role of patients in medical research.

“Together with Johan Sundström and Sara Riggare, we hope to establish contact with the first MS patient. Or at least with her tremors,” says Jakob Senneby.