“Shared bacterial compositions can do wonders for communality.”
The words are ringing in my ears. I wear a headset, which has been worn by dozens of others before me. An invisible mouth has been whispering to us all. So, are we part of the same community?
Before stepping into “The Operation Room,” a small gallery located outside of the American Hospital in Istanbul, I didn’t know what to expect. What to expect from an exhibition titled Flesh and Bone. In the group exhibition, the ways in which the body exists, survives, or shatters, all seemed to find a home for themselves through various artistic expressions and matters.
I just glance at a map before noticing what that is. I’m more focused on the headphones next to it, hanging there in all its bareness. I catch up with the sound in the midway: “I am scraping through dead skin cells, archives of the body: Dandruff, sebum, scaly, flaky excess. All this, for an infectious contact, teaching a language whose words are forms of infestation.” I find myself touching my arm unconsciously, hesitantly. As if it is my own body that speaks. Yet, I’m not familiar with this invasive language. Or maybe I am not aware of it, although it runs through my body. The voice makes me listen. It makes me listen carefully.
Only in my second run (one and a half to be more precise) I am able to catch the whole story. Artist Marina Papazyan’s “dear inflamed follicle, there is a commemoration in my skin” (2019) is a work of entanglements. The artist’s skin condition becomes a departure point for their research on leprosy. [1] From genetic susceptibility and memory to the illness’ hi(story) in the family and the world, Papazyan finds some solace in this more-than-human contamination across geographies. Their visual investigation puts family photos with ancient and historical images and a world map of leprosy. The map, initially I paid no attention to, shows approximately the present distribution of leprosy. Papazyan says some of the areas coincide with the color of their cheeks. And at that moment I realized how they speak in second person. They speak of themselves as they speak of me. And I wonder how other people before me came to recognize it, and how others after me will. Scalarity of effect of the visuals present another composition that do wonders for communality, perhaps. The present of the map is the past of today. However, the hierarchy of the distribution yesterday is still present today.
Wandering between past and present, Papazyan’s work is not about finding a cure but about crafting care. “Care is implied, as work, as necessity, as leisurely activity, and often beyond strict classifications”. Care is not natural, but it needs to be worked through. Papazyan understands that as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa wrote; care “is a living terrain” (2017, 8). It “need[s] to be constantly reclaimed from idealized meanings” (8). The immanence of the sound in the work draws more attention to the present and embodiment; to the constant effort the body shows – both to fight against itself and to fight together. The sonic presence’s dissonance with the map’s claimed presence (re)opens the past into another conversation, while creating an unexpected intimacy between and among skins albeit distance. Sounding the pain and conversing with multiple dispersed images, Papazyan embodies vulnerability as a care work.
[1] Leprosy is caused by slow-growing bacteria called Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis, and it affects, damages and deforms nerves, skin and/or eyes. Today, it is commonly known as Hansen’s Disease, after Dr. Gerhard Armauer Hansen (1841-1912), who discovered the microorganism that causes leprosy in 1874. The work of leprosy patient Stanley Stein (1899-1967) and his campaign in STAR, the in-house magazine of the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as Brazil’s renaming leprosy in 1975, played a significant role in disassociating the disease from the stigmas associated with the word leprosy (see Schexnyder (2024); Jørgensen; Delboni&Deps (2021)). In this essay, I use the word leprosy since the artist utilizes it as part of her historical research about the disease.
Image: From “Dear Inflamed Follicle, There Is a Commemoration in My Skin”, 2019.
Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of Care, 2017. University of Minnesota Press.
Papazyan, Marina. “Dear Inflamed Follicle, There Is a Commemoration in My Skin”, 2019. Prints on acetate paper, bilingual sound 10’30”.
