Despite what is going on in my personal life, I finally did find another voice in creation for the months to come.
An ambitious project but a challenging one.
In few words here are my first thoughts on the project.
The bent horse or hippocampus as it is referred to in latin, is a profoundly unusual fish because it swims, eats and reproduces in a unique manner.
This strange fish can be found in all the world’s seas. With its multiple facets, the “hippocampus planet ” offers some surprises. In all cases, it is of a rare beauty and fragility. The hippocampus is also one of the main components of the human brain. Its shape frequently allows for a comparison to a seahorse, as you can see in Hungarian neuroscientist László Seress’ 1980 preparation of the human hippocampus and fornix as it is compared with a seahorse. The earliest discursive description of the ridge running along the floor of the temporal horn of the lateral ventricle comes from the Venetian anatomist Julius Caesar Aranzi (1587), who also initially likened it to a seahorse. »
Thus, from the seabed to the center of our brain, comes the the “Great Hippocampus Question” which will explore a subjet inherant in my career as an artist: rape and Post Traumatic Stess Disorder.
For so long without any echo I felt an energy somewhere between my gut and the external world but it was trapped in a swirl. This energy is now ready to surface.
Eight individual, original videos and music compositions will present eight exclusive canvases of some of the
unknown aspects of posttraumatic stress disorder following rape.
« In the brain, as soon as an agression starts, our alarm system, the amygdala (responsible for decoding emotions and threat stimuli), is activated and this triggers a cascade of reactions to prepare our flight.
It causes, among other things, the production ofadrenaline and cortisol by the adrenal glands and stress hormones. The result : while the body is under tension, blood flow, heart rate and breathing speed up, muscles are contracted, and ready to begin flight.
But when the victim is immobilized by her attacker and cannot escape fast enough, quickly the brain amygdalan panics, the nerve centers in the cortex which are supposed to analyse then moderate reactions, are drown by the alert signals. Panic is complete. The amygdala overheats, the victim is in an extreme state of exceeded stress. Suddenly, she cannot defend herself, cram or even react. She is paralyzed and feels that she will die.
In order, to avoid a heart failure by the overvoltage of the amygdala, the brain triggers a sort of short circuit by releasing chemicals, morphine and ketamine, which will anesthetize and isolate the alarm system. The production of stress hormones is then halted.
It is as though the victim is cut off from the world, disconnected from her emotions. Yet, violence continues, but she feels almost nothing, giving the attack a sense of total surrealism or unreality. (victims say at some point they feel like a spectator of the event).
It is this dissociation that will enable the victim to stay alive, but, paradoxically, will cause the feeling of guilt and other consequences. Isolated and anesthetized by landfills of morphine and ketamine, the amygdala does not eliminate the trauma of rape from the hippocmpus, our memory system and memory analysis. The time of the rape is trapped as such in the amygdala. Thus, each flashback is the memory of the rape by the
untreated brain that the victim relives. An extremetly violent time. This is what is called post-traumatic stress. »