'The body under it is in my hands' is a quote from Sylvia Plath's 'the surgeon at 2AM'

Image by Ana Mendieta

It is through our body that we inhabit and live in the world. Our body is that what makes our relation to the world of things and others possible. At the same time it is through this same body that we can be hindered from communicating with the world and ourselves. As the primary place of our experience, our bodies are subject to harm and therefore they are always vulnerable.

As Johanna Hedva writes in Sick Woman Theory, our existence in our bodies is something that is primarily and always vulnerable.Vulnerability is not a temporary or possible state of the body: it is inherent to our bodily existence and therefore we must shape the world around this fact.

This evening will explore the relationship between our bodies and the earth, in particular, the sick body. We will speak about what it means to be sick in our society, about the ways in which we can and should change our perspectives on care, about healing and about the relationship between art and sickness.

Programme in English

Johanna Hedva is a fourth-generation Los Angelena on her mother’s side and, on her father’s side, the granddaughter of a woman who escaped from North Korea. She has published several books of poetry and a novel, The Crow and the Queen, in handmade limited editions. She’s currently at work on This Earth, Our Hospital, which includes "Sick Woman Theory" and "In Defense of De-Persons," and her second novel, The Twin.

Melissa Buzzeo’s fifth book a poetic memoir, Writing, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books (New York) in 2019. Her most recent book The Devastation, also from Nightboat, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in poetry in 2016. A chapbook If I Am a Silueta is being published in Berlin. She is also working on a book of essays on healing. She studied literature at Cornell and creative writing at the University of Iowa’s Writing Workshop and has taught all forms of creative writing in the BFA at Pratt Institute

Risja Marie Henriëtte Steeghs works and lives in London as an artist. She did not start her career in arts at an academy, but in a bed in a small village in Limburg, where she fought for her life and made collage pieces of old family photos. With her new found health she started making bigger pieces and the focus of her work shifted to larger textile works which she stitched together with needle and thread in Rio de Janeiro. At the moment she is enrolled in the MA Performance Art at the Royal College of Art in London. She tries to combine different kinds of media in her work and at the moment she is primarily focusing on performance and sculptural pieces. Here she searches for the border between art and spectatorship and tries to connect the spectator with the work in space, searching for an intimate moment between the artwork and spectator to come into existence.

Jules Sturm is currently teaching and conducting research at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) in Literary and Cultural Analysis. His research focus is on critical theories of the body. Originally trained in philosophy and women's studies, he extended my fields of interest to Theories of Art and Aesthetics, Queer Theory, Posthuman Theories, Phenomenology, and more recently Critical Disability Studies and Medical Humanities.

Simon van der Weele is a cultural analyst and philosopher. His work revolves around concepts of death, mourning and car. In May, he will begin a project on (in)dependency, care and disability at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht.