Petra Kuppers: The Scar of Visibility

“A scar: a meeting place between inside and outside, a locus of memory, of bodily change. Like skin, a scar mediates between the outside and the inside, but it also materially produces, changes, and overwrites its site. If skin renews itself constantly, producing the same in repetition, the scar is the place of the changed script: mountains are thrown up, the copy isn't quite right, crooked lines sneak over smooth surfaces. You can feel your scars itching, or pulsing, or, after a time, you can experience the sensation of touching yourself but feeling the touch as strange – nerves might not knit into “appropriate” lines. In these moments of strangeness, the core of phenomenological experience comes into the foreground of perception: that you are oriented toward the world, pressing and surging toward it from a place, a body, an origin. When this place becomes unfamiliar, sense, perception, and meaning making become experiential as spatial and temporal phenomena. There is a location to knowledge and sensation, and the scar can mark this insight.
The scar is also an image: it holds strong connotations of social violence, of outsider status, of negativity. And yet, mysteriously, it holds the gaze – the scar incites the look, invites the narrative, fuels the story, and anchors it back into (some version of) bodies, time, and space. Creative practices at the site of the scar can play with the mechanisms of repulsion and attraction, self and other, identity and production of difference. The scar as experience, image, embodied trope, then, moves its way through my study.” (1)

The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, University of Minnesota: Minneapolis, 2007.