Alina Popa: Disease as an Aesthetic Project

Alina Popa (1982-2019) was a Romanian artist who moved between choreography, theory, and contemporary art. For myself her most influential work was 'Disease as an Aesthetic Project'. 

In the same year as her death in 2019 a small book of her texts, notes and drawings, 'Square of Will in Square of Love' was published in Bucharest by PUNCH press; 'Disease as an Aesthetic Project', written in 2018 was used as the first chapter and set out her philosophy for practice. 

Her confrontation with illness was a love/hate inner transformative experience, she feels herself 'deformed, asymmetrical, slow and clumsy' and a 'monster' and she describes her responses as an artist thus:

    'I am representing it, drawing my fear, my obsession, my world. I am drawing the bandages on the holes on the thing on my leg. For every point I make a cell dies. I become obsessive about points. The tumour replies with needles. It wants more, more attention....

It's like a moon of a distant planet. It has craters and a surface between skin and stone, .... it spits ideas, it exhausts me'. 

As she writes she dissolves herself into her illness, its gravity sucks her in, and she decides that although the body is real, what we think about it is fiction and that we have to embrace its very strangeness, but to do that the body calls for a different language. The 'elasticity of sensations' that emerge from our inner body's experiences are the things she says that set poetry in motion. 

Her writing has helped me overcome my own issues in trying to visualise interoceptual experience. She opens a door for its re-interpretation, stating at one point, 'The body is abstract. It occupies more space than where it finds itself. That is why it can transform its anatomy into jungle.' 

Finally as she realised death is approaching, she designated the care for her body to an imaginary world and she begins to reside amongst the great courage of her dreams. 

The slippage between real life experience and poetry mirrors the states that we inhabit when we are very ill. Consciousness slips away and medication causes us to hallucinate and like the shaman that she often refers to, the ill person becomes a sensor for the lives of others that encounter them. Illness in this case is like an energy transducer where it operates as a switch that transforms energy from one state into another. Just as healthy muscles convert chemical energy into mechanical energy, the body's illness can convert mechanical energy into psychic or spiritual energy, an energy that can itself then be transformed into symbolic form. In the same way that electrical energy can be transformed by a transducer into a moving arrow on a gauge, the energy that eventually finds itself clothed in symbolic form, can find itself transformed into drawings and Alina Popa made her drawings emerge with titles such as 'Health in me', 'Pain amplified by moderate anger', 'Legs as felt', 'The ground writes the lyrics of the song' and 'Square of will in square of love'. Drawings that now she has passed on operate as batteries storing her psychic energies and releasing them into others as they turn the pages of her book. 

'Square of will in square of love'. 

Popa, A. (2019) Square of Will in Square of Love Bucharest: PUNCH

See also:

Drawing and healing

Embodied drawing conference report

The virus is looking at you

Hands, hygiene and hope

Drawing and wellbeing

Drawings as aesthetic transducers