Unthought Known

2020

The formation and understanding of oneself socially, culturally, and personally is ultimately grounded within memory. Memories from the past function as complex structures to serve the needs of the present and form decisions for the future. When an event becomes traumatic, however, the mind not only fails to remember it but also fails to know it and it is through this unknowing that one experiences a sense of detachment, dissociation, and disembodiment. However, the body knows it. Within affect theory, the body is exposed to invisible and visceral human and non-human forces before the mind makes conscious awareness of them. Therefore, the body does not only know the traumatic experience, but it is also imprinted with it where it remains perpetually present. Together, the mind and body become the site of trauma, entangled between affective and psychological integration. 

Unthought Known is a multimedia photographic series that investigates the psychological and corporeal lived experiences of traumatic memory. Within the framework of affect theory, memory studies, and psychoanalysis, I focus on the ways in which the encounters with the traces of trauma create a dissociated and disembodied experience of the self, time and space. Within the studio, I construct spaces out of translucent materials that envelop the body in various states of fragmentation, isolation, and suspension. In relation to the video and project as a whole, the installation of smaller photographic prints, titled Fragment, varies in scale and placement in order to reflect the fragmented and inconsistent narrative of traumatic memory.