who am I to you?
Who has agency in medical journals or documents? In my drawings, I wanted to put the subjects in unconventional positions because it is rare to see anatomy drawings of people being examined or observed that feel like they positioned themselves. Furthermore, I was intrigued in how we practice our own agency in times of social distancing.
The sudden bombarding of medical data and imagery made me curious as to how bodies are represented when put in relation with these forms of media. For my series of drawings, I used the techniques of anatomy or medical drawing to meditate and document the experience of being a body during a pandemic. This drawing was reimagined from a medical image I kept seeing about virus testing.
Here, I was influenced by Foucault’s analysis of “the window” in Discipline and Punish in which he describes how people were asked to come to their window, during the plague, so a registrar could count them as either dead or alive. Coming to the window created a way to subtly expedite power. This simple act of appearing at the window made the individual isolated but seen. The subject reproduces discipline and subtly gives power to the administration by contributing to its process. In times of plague, or pandemic, how does one hold their agency without giving power to discipline or a higher administrative order? As we isolate ourselves, we still allow ourselves to be seen by administrative powers, by Zoom, by our government, but what will these higher powers do for us, for the bodies at the window?