The Wandering, Winding Way of the Wound

Step right up. Don’t be shy! 

Do you wonder about the ubiquity of trauma, the globalizing pervasiveness of triggers, and the hidden curriculum of healing?

If you do, you are not alone.

Let’s talk about trauma: To heal their wounds, chimpanzees would often use their palms to grab certain insects out from the air, squeeze the critters into a pulp, and then apply the stuff to their (and other chimpanzees’) wounds. Wound healing practices among chimpanzees are not only examples of zoopharmacognosy (that is, the study of how animals heal themselves); they are also instances of the vast multi-species cat’s-cradling meshwork that is often obscured when we think about wounds and healing as individual/isolated events. Put simply, wounds are not “owned” by the individual bodies defined by them; wounds are field-like intensities.

This gathering investigates :

• the politics of “harm reduction”; and, the need for new therapeutic configurations — a politics and aesthetics given to the eruption of the new and the unthought.
• Our goal is to investigate what modern subjectivity obscures, to trace the lineage of bodily manufacture within industrial arrangements, and to touch the far edges of our bodies and porous membranous skins, long enough to taste their insectoid secretions.
• We focus not on what gets in the way of healing, but on what healing gets in the way of.
• We think through contermoder, animist, Yoruba ideas of agency to investigate the way the city produces wellbeing.
• We inquire about what is obscured in the co-productions of healing/justice/wholeness as recovery, when framed as a return to the familiar images we are used to.
• Ultimately, as we examine wounds as animist vocations or as multi-species ecologies, we aim to co-weave a decolonial aesthetic of submerged memory, of secret longing, of silenced suspicions, of unbridled magic, of pedagogical possibility, of sensuous touch, and of therapeutic potency.

In a sense, every wound comes with its world. Every wound is already a political event, an intra-species connection, an obscuration of the monstrosity of bodies. One might ask then: what are our wounds doing? What are they imbricated with? What are they building?

Trauma is not what happens to the body; trauma is the body in its reiterative world-shaping, form-taking capacity, and response-ability. Trauma is how modern bodies are manufactured.

This workshop is about trauma, triggers, and trouble. I wonder about the fundamentalism of trauma discourse and what its histories as a clinical concept conceals.

This workshop is about the colonial capture of psychological wounds and the politics that sponsors them and puts them to work in the production of certain realities.

This workshop is about trauma as the modern grammar of loss.

This is about the danger of healing paradigms dedicated exclusively to “recovery” and instigated by the worrying centrality of trauma. I ask: what/whose bodies are co-produced and reproduced when we imagine healing?

The event is about risk of wholeness and shadows of cure.

Join Bayo Akomolafe and friends Tyson Yunkaporta, Vanessa Andreotti, and Sophie Strand for this seditious exploration of the edges of this civilized ethic.

In the wandering, winding way of the wound, a new cartography of possibility yet-to-come sprouts.