Always-Already Absent Present: On Trauma and Materiality

Abstract

In Always-Already Absent Present: On Trauma and Materiality, I explore linguistic experience and its effects through my art practice working with organic materials. My story started with a painful car accident. Later, aspects of that trauma were repeated when I realized that being outside my mother tongue, the same traumatic accident was occurring � this time, leaving its mark on my tongue. This theses provides perspective on the concept of death, expanding the notion to the fundamental connection of human beings with nature and the intermediation of language. Living in a language other than my mother tongue, with its constant mandate of translation, has forced me to navigate the following issue: Humans do not have direct access to nature. Rather, this connection is murdered by language. In my artistic practice, I examine this barrier through the formation of waste, the abject, and the language of excrement.