ANAMNES/ANAMNESIS
Mixed media installation, 2009
Dialogue at Gothenburg City Museum
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I read about a writer, who when asked how she found her writer´s voice replies that everything she has ever written and is writing at the moment comes out of a current and specific pain. The writing soothes the pain even if it can never completely extinguish it.
Pain insists on being narrated. An experience of illness often finds its first tentative narrative outlet through the encounter with the medical doctor or other health care professionals. In the anamnesis, the doctor, based on the patient´s description, formulates what they find to be the appropriate clinical narrative. The expectation of a certain diagnosis is rejected or confirmed by the medical expertise, whose statement often serves as a powerful stimulus in how the patient identifies with and relates to the medical condition from here on. The patient´s self-image and expectations will be adjusted in accordance with the new elements that continuously will be added to the narrative, The sick self is not predetermined; rather it is a construct of the clinical narrative, in the same way that our lives are constructs of the life narrative.
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In Anamnesis (2009) material from the artist´s own medical records has been adopted to show how interpersonal communication incites forms of affect. Through the process of transferring the text onto the wall, the artist´s own physical practice (of pain) entered into the piece. The wall was transformed into a body, the body into a wall. Using the physical act of writing and the inherent narrative layers (stories of pain surfacing as the work¨s story), the intention was to visualize issues that are fundamental to how our inner as well as outer narratives are constructed.
In the encounter between the doctor, assumedly 'in possession' of language, and the patient who is 'all body', the responsibility for constructing the narrative that shapes the patient as suffering subject lies with the medical staff as well as with the individual. The clinical dialogue on pain has moral consequences. Sometimes the anamnesis is uncertain, the
diagnosis unreliable, the pain gives no clue as to what it represents. There is nothing tangible on the outside, in physical space, to refer to. Pain has entered life "quietly" and discontinuously, forming a structure full of dents and gaps. The metaphor of the dent indicates the position of the suffering subject vacillating in between expectation and despair. Waiting for the next result, the next evaluation, the next medication or treatment, hoping to be able to start again. The waiting room is a striking image of the "remission society" where people exist in a non-space, in-between healthy and ill. Neither nor. In-between coming and going. Waiting for someone or something. Taking time out. For an indefinite period of time.