Savior? 2015 (Performance documentation, 6 minutes 12 seconds)
Human senses are deeply social in character. There is little of “human nature” that is outside relationship, outside culture. Yet, there seem to be some psychological states that are simply there, beyond interpretation. And surely the most compelling of these is pain. Pain initially contains an extreme privacy of the occurrence that is invisible to anyone outside the boundaries of the person’s body. However, when it merges into the realm of imagining, they begin to move out of the self-contained loop within the body and become sharable. As the sentience of pain enters into a process of externalization, it becomes “social and acquires its distinctly human form.” In other words for pain to be communicable, what was first conceived as anterior to language and so inseparable from the body, eventually has to go through an image of agency and be projected onto an object, which then becomes something concrete that must enter the social realm.