A Stigma Burnt on My Quivering Flesh
2025 –
As an early-stage project, the series investigates neurodivergence as a site of both internal conflict and external marginalization – a terrain shaped by sharp contrasts between visibility and invisibility, normality and otherness, inclusion and erasure.
The project draws its title from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and positions her, alongside other neurodivergent voices, as a central reference in the pursuit of reclaiming subjectivity in a world that has long pathologised cognitive difference.
Though often invisible to the eye, neurodivergence entails a continuous negotiation with social norms, systems of classification, and attempts at correction. Historically categorised as defective, unfit, or dangerous, neurodivergent people have been subjected to institutional violence, eugenics (not least in Nazi Germany), and forced “treatments.” These legacies persist today in subtler forms: from the imperative to “mask” in daily life, to ongoing efforts to locate and define neurodivergence through neuroscience and genetics, to the economic exclusion at the job market of those who do not align with neurotypical standards of productivity, behavior, or communication.
As someone marked by the stigma of neurodivergence (Mensa), I have long moved through the world as both hyper-visible (as “different”) and invisible (as a complex subject). This duality is central to the project.
More detail coming soon.