My Body Mediating Myself and the Built Environment: Mediation as Translation

Being Able bodied is like being fluent in a language. You can make the transition of thought to sentence with ease, your words are a very direct manifestation of your thoughts, and they are understood seamlessly by any outsider.

Being disabled means that, to achieve that same end goal of coherence, you must manoeuvre around it indirectly, using a ‘partial knowledge’ of a language. You splutter and falter, your thought-processes are more lengthy, your position never completely understood.

On the night of 15th March 2017, I was dropped on my head onto the pavement outside a club in Cambridge. Since then, I have been living with the symptoms of my head injury, each drastically altering my experience of the world around me, and my occupation and movements within it. This project will explore the specific “symptoms” of my injury through a mediation, celebration and critique of the new everyday “moments” in the built environment which I now encounter.

“​Partially “Bed” Bound”​ explores the chronic pain in my head, neck and back, which results in the need to lie down completely flat regularly and at unanticipated moments in public spaces.