How does a body immersed in the experience of pain, and aware of its finitude, listen?
A first-person journey through the experience of a patient body, articulated through a personal diary, a series of short texts and an extensive audiovisual essay in three acts
“Pain always occurs in the singular”
Chantal Maillard
Pain is a singular experience and is always lived singularly. Suffering sometimes confronts us with finitude and often requires us to become patients—and to practise patience. Pain, it is said, may give rise to a situated form of knowledge that can, with luck, help us live better and perhaps longer.
“Hemen”, meaning “here” in Basque, reflects this situated knowledge in the place where pain becomes a present experience. It bears witness to particular forms of learning and knowing: knowing how to wait, and knowing how to listen to what we often do not want to hear.
Hemen is a body with three organs that enter into dialogue with one another:
Diary of a Patient Body begins with real experiences of pain and illness. Narrated in the first person, it describes transformations of the body and subjectivity, using writing not only as a form of memory but also as a kind of incantation that gives voice to an experience we always wish to forget.
Body, Listening and Finitude brings together a series of texts that approach listening as an acoustic phenomenon, a form of knowledge and a practice of attention and care within the experience of pain and the awareness of being finite—in order to learn how to be a patient, and how to be patient.
Horizontal Listening is an audiovisual essay divided into three acts and constructed from these texts. The work proposes a slow and attentive listening to impermanence and to the experience of pain and finitude, in relation to the horizontality that illness so often requires of the body.
These three parts of a single body pose and proceed from the same question: how can we listen to a body that hurts and recognises itself as finite?
“Hemen maiz, hiltzen naiz”
Gabriel Aresti