Wound-Man

Video performance, 4 minutes 53 seconds

To Irina

When a cousin sister with whom we had been very close in the past died suddenly of meningitis, I went into an acute phase of grief. And after a while, I thought more and more about the vulnerable human condition when faced with loss. I thought about how different the perception of grief is from the inside and the outside. How the inside and outside conflict with each other because of stigmatization. How difficult it is to share, to say out loud. Even though grieving is a natural process.

Through visual metaphor, I show how existential pain blurs the boundary between body, mind, and soul and turns them into a single wound. Medical bandages will not heal it. They are only a way to cover the wound in the person’s desire to stop suffering for a while. Bandaging one’s own body becomes an act of fixing the pain and accepting mortality during the grieving process.

Sound: a response from a Google search engine to the query “the pain of losing a loved one”, voiced by an automatic voice from an online translator