2024 Liza Mamon

Liza Mamon

hear my pain heal

Living in the pain-avoidant world, where suffering and harm necessarily entail negative connotations, my project aims to break the stigma around emotional and physical suffering and restore its place as a social collective practice.

Pain might seem a self-evident, universal experience known to any of us. Its graspability, however, is complicated by pain’s individuality and invisibility. Pain’s subjective nature makes it challenging to elucidate one’s suffering through language and share it with a community of others. Consequently, the perception of pain in Western cultures is associated with lonely practice, unnoticeable by the majority unless actively disclosed by the sufferer.

Yet, the experience of pain, as shown in Sarah Ahmed‘s book “The Cultural Politics of Emotion”, is never encapsulated within one body but travels from one body to another through impressions, sensory activation and memory. In other words, the pain never stays unnoticed and becomes a collective experience of sharing negative feelings through empathy and co-suffering.

This theoretical argument is supported by a long tradition of physical pain rituals, such as dancing for days, walking on hot coals, or enduring piercings, practised in various cultural traditions worldwide, raising a sense of belonging, resilience, solidarity, and shared identity within communities. Among them are the Anastenaria festival in Greece, the Sun Dance ceremony of Native American tribes, the Santa Muerte pilgrimage in Mexico, and many others.

This workshop aims to create a safe space where pain can be experienced, observed and put under control without any physical or mental risks. We will reflect on pain as an essential factor in individual, communal, and political identity building, focusing our attention on the pain that has already been there but never had a chance to be witnessed and recognised by others.

_{Performance Shots, Friendship in Dark Times. Exhibition, Berlin, 2024}