I struggle with the idea of ‘recovery’ – particularly when it’s seen as a linear narrative, moving from a point of un-productivity to productivity.
See Recovery in the Bin for a critique of neo-liberal understandings of the term.
Many times over my years running the art-studio in a psychiatric hospital, I’ve seen people’s trajectories, each as complex as the person living their individual process of ‘recovery’.
I have been looking at a historic film entitled ‘World War 1 Shell Shock Victim Recovery (1910s) from the Pathe Archive (stills above). I feel like a voyeur, spying on this stranger’s vulnerability. When I show my choreologist friend, Olga, she doesn’t feel uncomfortable but sees only the potential in the person’s movements, no matter how broken and halting (this is how they appear to me).
Part of the problem is that I’m used to thinking in still imagery, but isolating moments from the flow of the film is a kind of death – I’m creating a ‘corpse’ image. As Barthes writes, ‘[P]osing, I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.’
To rid me of this self-consciousness, she gives me a series of ‘prescriptions’ – antidotes to the static self-image that keeps me locked in fear (of pain, embarrassment …).
