Go to Daniela Acosta Parson bio
“A line, a patch of color, is not really important because it records what one has seen, but for what it will lead one to keep seeing.” — Berger 2011
“Shouldn’t broad dialogue, in multiple languages, in diverse settings, be what defines us as writers, as scholars, as people dedicated to ideas?” — Castillejo 2016
Psychology and sociology have taken an interest in pain as an integral part of the human experience. Sorrow falls within the range of normal emotions; however, trauma is the consequence of an experience that exceeds known frameworks of representation. This suffering is timeless, tearing apart the web of meanings, eliminating the predictability of the world, dissolving identity, generating mistrust, and is linked to the irreparable, horror, and the unnameable. When an event has degraded and humiliated people, leaving them in a devastated world, the way one chooses to communicate, represent, and receive testimony can deepen the pain or contribute to its processing. How can we share the experience when words are insufficient? Is it possible to create a language of pain?
Poisoned Knowledge: The Descent into the Everyday
Sometimes pain ceases to be an event and becomes a foundation. When a painful event has destroyed the world as it was known, one can reconstitute subjectivity by leaning on suffering, violence, and subjugation. This reconstitution of the subject is possible when one acquires what Veena Das calls poisoned knowledge. This is a type of knowledge that allows one to “know through suffering.” Likewise, it is possible to share that knowledge, that experience, even if only partially. The witness of suffering must let themselves be slightly poisoned by the other’s pain, sense it in their own body, and understand something beyond words. Their hands will move to alleviate the suffering they witness. There can be a true understanding of the other.
When poisoned knowledge is acquired, we have the possibility to reinhabit the devastated world, the world to which we no longer belonged. The past does not become an inert burden but allows us to recognize and occupy the signs of the wound. We are and can be again. This is done through a daily and patient effort to repair broken relationships, as well as to repair oneself. Thus, although born from horror, possessing poisoned knowledge means being in a privileged place of enunciation, allowing you to understand things and forms that otherwise would not be comprehended so clearly.
I possess poisoned knowledge. Drawing is how I reinhabit my place of devastation. Death looks through my eyes as if peering behind a mask. Drawing is how I can think, how I can create, and how I can know and be. It is how I can return to belong to this world. Can you sense it in your body when you observe it?
On Drawing
Drawing functions as a translation, transforming a private idea into something that can be directly observed by others. It also has a particular temporal depth: the existence time of the observed object; the hours and days the artist’s eye spends contemplating that object; and the time of contemplation of those who view the drawing. Nothing is taken for granted. In the act of drawing, one must reflect on each stroke and how it contributes to the formation of the image through charcoal and through meaning.
Its small format demands a commitment of approach and effort from the observer. Its smallness alludes to curiosity. Additionally, drawing is honest and shows its mistakes and process: the wounds of the paper, the erased parts, the crumpled areas, the incomplete elements. Drawing can be a bridge between different languages and forms of cognition. In this reciprocal looking and giving and taking between the drawing, the artist, and the viewer, an exchange we will call conversation becomes possible, and the poison carrying the knowledge of pain can be transmitted.
From Solitude
Creating and transmitting poisoned knowledge in a way that transcends the limits of language is my hope and my endeavor. However, I am small and insignificant. My pain and my story have been forgotten or disbelieved. I speak to others and feel that they are on the other side of a bridge I cannot cross. So, I speak to the paper, and the pencil speaks to me. I make no sounds, but my drawing screams and claims its place in the world. My place in the world.
You will look at my drawing. In this way, I, as an observed object of study, have the chance to look at you, thus, unabashedly, from my pain, from the borders of my place of devastation. In this way, I can escape being a languid being observed in stillness. I cease to belong merely to the number of statistics and archives. I manage to recover my face that had been diluted in generalization. The drawing rises as a minimal monument erected in protest against suffering, silence, and the relevance whose recognition has been denied to me. It is a demonstration of solitude and ostracism. It is the incomprehension and mistrust and the exhaustion of language. It is the most faithful testimony even more than my sincerest narration and the most elaborate discourses. It is me, naked, showing my bleeding wounds. It is the dark secret that is not told in words. Drawing is the ultimate knowledge of experience.
Bibliography
- Berger, J. (2011) Sobre el dibujo .1a. ed. , 2a. tirada. ed. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.
- Das, V. (2008). El acto de presenciar. Violencia, conocimiento envenenado y subjetividad. En F. Ortega (Ed.), Veena Das: Sujetos de dolor, agentes de dignidad (217-250). Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias
