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Growing up in an evangelical church I took communion most weeks To a child’s mind it seemed an excitingly gruesome process: the bread, broken, shared and eaten to represent Christ’s body; the wine drunk to represent his blood This morbid, albeit normalised, ingestion is intensified in Roman Catholic orthodoxy’s concept of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine are not mere representations, but in the moment of consumption are believed to be Christ’s flesh and blood incarnate   This theological nuance might be described as the difference between simile and metaphor, or being like and being the thing itself In relation to her new work, ECZEMA!, artist and writer Maria Fusco described transubstantiation as ‘the biggest metaphor you can get’ An experimental musical score and script written for one voice, it attempts not so much a visual or aural representation of the skin disease as its embodiment in sound, words and performance Commissioned as part of a festival celebrating the NHS’s 70th birthday, ECZEMA! premiered – importantly, given the NHS’s Welsh origins – at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, where it was also recorded for future release as a vinyl EP with Matthew Herbert’s label Accidental Records   In the windowless Hoddinott Hall, a big fat metaphor sat front and centre: a pipe organ ‘The skin is an organ An organ is the skin’, read the text in the lime green handouts distributed among the audience, indicating how Fusco intended the instrument to be understood Despite this primer, it was a shock when a churning sound started up from the large pipes mounted on the far wall of the hall The restless, animalistic rhythm formed the sonic and conceptual backbone of the piece, and a direct channelling of eczema’s definitive gesture: the scratch Fusco is a lifelong eczema sufferer, and working with prototyper Yann Seznec, she wore a ‘scratch glove’ fitted with sensors and accelerometers in order to record the movement of her scratching as data The particular scratch that comprises the score of ECZEMA! lasted 30 seconds It was then stretched out to a duration of 30 minutes and ‘fed’ through the organ by the