open wounds
Mental or psychological pain is no less real than many other types of pain related to parts of our
body. In everyday’s life, we use many metaphorical terms borrowed from physical pain to
describe other types of wounds that actually never hurt or bleed; however, we never seem to give
that kind of pain the same adequate attention.
This project was born as an experiment. I asked nine different individuals to name one
single object that was somehow related to the idea of pain. Unexpectedly, none of those
considered pain as a feeling connected to the body, but rather as something related to the mind.
The collection of these objects create a shift in what we generally associate to the idea of pain.
They recall a state of ‘feeling broken’, a feeling that involves the experience of being wounded,
loss of self, disconnection, critical awareness. These objects represent wounds that are invisible
and that probably will never completely heal.
