Tales from fractured minds

Dissociation is a psychological state of separation from reality among different aspects of consciousnes, such as memory, identity, emotions and perceptions. It serves as a protective or refuge mechanism. The spectrum of its manifestation is broad. Beyond the most common ones, such as losing track of time or getting distracted while driving or walking, dissociation is a survival tactic: a response to stress or trauma. It can thus be associated with disorders such as psychogenic amnesia, depersonalization and dissociative identity disorder. However, it can also manifest itself as a collective response to the bewilderment caused by global events including warfare, climate and political crises, identity and humanitarian crises, and therefore as a fracture, resistance or surrender to the power structures at play.

It is an altered state, subtle and imperceptible, whereby one is simultaneously present and unreachable, in a specific place and elsewhere: distracted, absorbed, absent. It is a disconnection from physical reality we live in, towards an imaginative dimension that postulates and creates multiple identities and perspectives: the image not as fiction, but as a component of the real. Dissociation is a functional and veridical act: a continuous oscillation between the surrounding reality and the imaginary, placing the sensation of the inner self as its center. Entering the gallery means dissecting one’s own brain to observe dissociative and traumatic states. The space transforms into a layering of thoughts and images, a distorted, muffled journey within memory, caught between intimacy and exteriority, recollections and suffering.

Here, private places and public spaces – recurring in several works as well as sounds, voices and reminiscences – are merged, forming an invisible and incommunicable bubble. Dissociation takes shape in our lived experience, blending personal events and global issues, generating new images that are the hazy product of a conscious post-production. Like an editing montage, it unites languages, desires and emotions.