Cartography of wound

From 2015 to 2016, I started to experience a series of aggressive loss, both physical and emotional, at a certain degree that I felt I was hitting the rock bottom. Overwhelming days which ended by a death, a paralyzing grief. I remember the day when my cat “poem” hit by a car and passed away and underlined the pain that I tried to repress over the last year. Death of my “poem” came like a thunder and crashed my whole world. It was too symbolic, too real, too abject, the cold body; ‘I literally lost my poem’. I buried “Poem” in the garden in front of our house. I knew I had to mourn the pain away, but I was paralyzed and disoriented, without any sense of direction. I found myself being absolutely lost for a moment in the depth of my wound, so lost that I couldn’t even recognize my wound. I remember that day very well, when I was sitting at my desk, displaced, absolutely discombobulated, and I started to draw a map, an imaginary map, a map to reorient myself, a map to give me a sense of direction, like a cartography of my wound, something like morphine. I looked at the map and then finally, I bursted, for days. At home.

Acknowledging the pain is the most difficult part of the healing process, like a physical wound, when it has to be washed and sewn away, when blood cells start to clump together and clot, protecting the woundcells, helping them to recover. Sometimes acknowledging the pain is more painful than the wound itself. Sometimes all we need is courage to face our wounds. These maps at best assisted me to sew my wound, to navigate myself back to where the pain was coming from, where exactly the wound was located, to embrace it, to mourn it, to let it go and to transform it. Our wounds are way older than we think, our wounds are older than us, older than our bodies.

For a while trains became my atelier, I made most of these maps on the road. There is something therapeutical about the trains…

First map: Pack your bags, we are leaving…

 On my way to canton Valais: I woke up and found a dead bird in the balcony, exactly 2 weeks after the death of “poem”, we made a kind of funeral for the bird together with Annabel. We were both wounded, the bird was just an excuse.

My Head in Antarctica…

Finding seven magic deserts

An imaginary road to Africa…

We will end up somewhere eventually…