A[r]MOUR – Andrea Zeffiro

amour
noun
• a love affair or lover, especially one that is secret

armour
Pronunciation:/ˈɑːmə/

[mass noun]
• 1 the metal coverings formerly worn to protect the body in battle
• 2 (also armour plate) tough metal layer covering a military vehicle or ship to defend it from attack.
• military vehicles collectively
• 3 the protective layer or shell of some animals and plants.
• 4 a person’s emotional, social, or other defences

verb
[with object]
• provide (someone) with emotional, social, or other defences

These photographs depict movement, indeed, in a conventional sense of the word, that is, as a body in-motion. At a philosophical level however, these images project a sentient motion, a body in-emotion. It is a body emerging into expression. Of becoming made. Of becoming unmade. This is a body at a threshold of meaning. Pleasure/Pain. There is pleasure to be found in-pain. The pleasure of solace, the pleasure of a secret world filled with fantasies of wholeness. To be in-pain is to be dislocated from a sense of self. That-which-is-me-but-not-me. One is haunted by the specter of a former self, by the fragments of a former life. To be in-pain is often an illusion. The body becomes a trickster: responding when not spoken to, ignoring directives, and maintaining an exterior semblance of wholeness. To be in-pain or full-of-pain – the fullness of pain and its experience – is consuming. And yet, it is human sentience, what Elaine Scarry (1985) describes as the felt-fact of aliveness [1]. A body in-pain, that is, as a body in-emotion, is to feel with a passion that devours.

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References

[1] Scarry, Elaine. (1985). The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 22.

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Andrea Zeffiro is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Transforming Pain Research Group at the School of Interactive Arts + Technology, Simon Fraser University.

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