Becoming Foreign to Oneself: Embodied Encounters with Patients’ Written Memories of Mental Hospitals

This article focuses on the ways in which an artist-researcher has encountered an extensive archive comprising Finnish individuals’ written memories of mental hospitals through a corporeal approach. The process of reading these accounts and the making of a short film, titled Here. Somehow, based on selected excerpts from some patients’ and visitors’ writings and a site-specific choreographic process, forms the core around which insights spiral.

Attuning to the writings and physical sites through corporeality was enabled through the Skinner Releasing Technique (SRT), an embodied movement method. This article deliberates on the potential of corporeal practice, through movement, to transform, reveal, and mediate something that is ineffable. What does it mean to research hunches and fractures, to read, write and perform through one’s vulnerable corporeality – which is inscribed in and transformed by SRT – to the extent that one eventually becomes foreign to oneself? A phenomenological approach with an interest in affects and atmospheres offers one way to discuss this unexpected phenomenon arising out of an encounter with writings and the physical locations inseparable from them.