Como poner en palabras el dolor del cuerpo
2025
Wood, Tft screens, Esp32, Arduino, led light, plastic, x-ray, cotton fabric.
Dimensions: 30x28x28cm
This piece was commissioned for the exhibition Relatos de lo insólito at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan (MAZ), curated by Proyecto E.M.E.
How to Put into Words the Pain of the Body begins with the impossibility of naming the physical experience of suffering. Pain, in its rawness, always exceeds language and fractures the symbolic order that usually organizes our lives. When suffering erupts, speech falters, sentences become insufficient, and a void opens up between what is felt and what can be expressed. The piece takes the form of a hospital model: a small wooden bear lies on a minimal bed, connected to IV bags. Around it, X-rays and medical monitors suggest the technical and clinical effort to translate suffering into data, images, and signs. Yet behind it, on the larger screen, another sequence appears: splintered logs shown again and again, as if matter itself bore the memory of fracture. The images of broken wood operate as a visual metaphor for rupture, for that which cannot be hidden—pain always leaves its mark, even when language fails to describe it. The reduced scale of the piece intensifies the effect, turning an existential drama into a model, an intimate scene oscillating between the childlike and the clinical. The bear, with its neutral expression, embodies a condition of radical vulnerability, while the hospital device situates it in a space of both care and estrangement. The body, like wood, splinters; images attempt to capture the invisible, yet the experience remains irreducible. The work thus emerges as a reflection on the tension between what is felt and what can be said, between intimate experience and the attempts at representation..