0x5a6abe2b…070bsent to0x6021a6e7…6c00·#21,081,974·view on Etherscan
0x5a6a···070bOctober 30, 2024
I wrote this poem months after my first son was born, having only partly processed the moment of his birth--a botched induction that resulted in an emergency cesarean after a doctor erroneously diagnosed me with a failed placenta. When my son was born, he weighed much more than the doctor had represented, and my placenta proved healthy.
I had spent the entire pregnancy preparing for a natural birth, physically, mentally and emotionally. I was hoping to stay off drugs as much as possible and fully experience the moment. Instead, I ended up alone in a glacial operating room after my son's heart rate dropped during induced contractions of birth.
Echo Graph leaves all these details out. When I wrote the poem, I was still unable to face what had happened, despite needing to record the experience in some way. This poem documents the moment I began to use language to come to terms--literally, to find the words--with a traumatic moment.
The video work expands the original intent of the poem in that it visually represents both resistance and entrapment. The body moves in ways it cannot move inside the womb. Indeed, an adult body has no place inside a uterine cave. And yet, the adult body seizes ownership of space via confident motion.
I named the piece Echo Graph only after creating the video work because I loved the idea of how the unsaid reverberates, leaving a trail of perceivable marks, or graphs. (But the poem, as published in my book Mammal, was named Placental.)
It's especially meaningful that my personal experience echoed with the work's collector. This work, through its exchange, carves a connection between my embodied experience and its collector's own memories, thus becoming an echo graph of Echo Graph.
Images from the ultrasound of my second child, Nina, born via a compulsory C-section, can be found in this folder:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HGcxLKMAWLJTureKxKXtMqSt-XYA3qUz?usp=drive_link