»Narrative Anatomy« is the sketchbook for an interdisciplinary research centered on illness narratives. It highlights Cristina Vidruțiu’s personal reflections in the process of documentation – comprising encounters with people, places, information, and events.
Because an interview is about asking a question and getting an answer, on the spot, engaging with the person in front of you, going forward together with that person and somehow building together the path of the questions to be asked and of the answers to be given, a navigation that in the end allows both people involved to clarify a series of aspects, I really can’t call this piece an interview, although this is how I feel as I
A conversation with Răzvan Georgescu on Testimony I discovered Răzvan Georgescu’s documentary Testimony with a sort of enchantment, while researching for my project on illness narratives. I was happy at the moment, I guess, because I’d found a Romanian dealing with the topic of illness narratives. Somehow, that made me think I could better grasp his work, as we had the Romanian language in common. But I was soon to find out that illness is both an individual experience and
She was shaking, all curled up, with her eyes closed. I called her, and she managed to open her eyes just a little bit, but she wasn’t able to get up by herself anymore. I knew she was weak, as she was barely eating anything at all for the last couple of days. Her breathing was very shallow. She didn’t cry, the suffering was done in silence. Looking at her, I knew that if nothing would be done immediately, she
A conversation with Amandeep Sandhu on »Sepia Leaves« After writing the first entry for Narrative Anatomy, I got a message from Amandeep Sandhu, a former fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, telling me that he’d left a novel he wrote on mental disability in the library. I was intrigued by the reaction my article got and also by the coincidence. Telling my story got me to another story. The next day I got Sepia Leaves and I read it almost
Before you start reading this piece, please start playing on your computer Serghei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PkEkxMb2yI Think of it as background music, an alternative narrative or a modern hourglass for this reading session. Back home in Romania, my daily reading menu includes all sorts of readings: each morning, in the office, I get updated while reading the latest news from all over the world, regarding culture, politics, economy; on the bus, on my way back home, if
I grew up in a house where diagnoses were part of the daily conversations as my mother was a nurse and storytelling was a must because my father was a reader. My favorite bedtime story was Little Red Riding Hood, but the fact that I was asking my father to tell it to me every night, made him imagine new versions of it for me – in which the protagonists would sometimes end up even in a hospital, on the