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• 1 media/Untitled design-7.png media/Untitled design-15.png media/Untitled design-7.png 2023-11-28T10:55:57-08:00 Where Does it Hurt? Archiving the Body in Pain 50 Srija Umapathy image_header 2024-02-12T06:29:30-08:00

  I have now been in pain long enough to forget what it was like not to experience it every day. Muscle memories are fascinating for this reason; move your limbs a certain way long enough and the movement eventually has the ability to transcend thought. My pain is present even in the absence of such thoughts. It is memory, it is life. This project is an attempt to document my pain and the various forms it takes. Sometimes, it is a tree; sometimes, it is a vine awkwardly making its way towards the ceiling; it is an elegy to the old self; a museum of objects I must always always carry lest it come when it is not yet meant to.

  My medical archive has consistently been “normal”. I document this “normalcy” besides my experience of “non-normalcy” hoping that this forced intimacy eventually disrupts the distance and meaning between the two. It is not an attempt to make the invisible visible, because that invariably preserves the binary I want to disturb. By archiving the pain outside of the body– through objects and spaces– I extend this experience beyond the self, for it is by exiting the self that you can draft an invitation for the other.
  
  The sections Epigraph, Pareidolia, and Anomaly invoke misrecognition, misplacement, and misalignment. Whereas, the Museum of the Everyday attempts to archive the pain outside of embodied experience. The photograph as a form allows me to trouble the dialect between seeing and knowing, truth and falsity, “normal” and “abnormal” in the field of medicine. 

   

  Epigraph

  The word Epigraph stems from the Greek word Epigraphein which means ‘to inscribe’. In Literature, the Epigraph is at once present and absent. It offers contexts and also decontextualizes at the same time. An Epigraph is usually removed from its context and placed elsewhere to offer different kinds of meanings. It is a reminder of its origin but also of its displacement from that origin. The concept of the Epigraph suggests that linguistic representation does not necessarily suggest truth, and language, therefore, is a perpetual movement away from ontology.
  
  
  

  Pareidolia
   

  
  
  
  
  Etymologically, the word Paraeidolia comes from the Greek word Para meaning “instead of” and Eidolon meaning form or shape. Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon where a person perceives a familiar pattern, such as a face or meaningful image, in random or unrelated stimuli. This can occur in various sensory modalities, but it is most commonly associated with visual perception. For example, people see faces in clouds, rock formations, or everyday objects. Pareidolia is a result of the human brain's tendency to seek familiar patterns and make sense of ambiguous or random stimuli. In the field of medicine, it is used to describe hallucinations associated with certain illnesses.
  
  

  
  Museum of the Everyday

  
  
  
  
   

  Anomaly

  I have often wanted to sit while cooking. The spatial orientation of kitchens does not always allow for this to happen. This deliberate act of placing objects in spaces they traditionally don't occupy introduces a profound exploration of incongruency, extending beyond the mere rearrangement of physical elements. Just as the chair disrupts the expected order within the kitchen, the architecture of normalcy undergoes a shift in our perception when we witness such anomalies.