Diktgymnasiet and I speak to each other from the comfort of our sofas. It is just before Christmas and we start chatting about the different viruses I have been trying to get rid of. Diktgymnasiet offers advice on medicine and supplements, drawing on the knowledge of the body, symptoms and treatments that they have built up in the years they have been living with post-viral illness. With only a handful of doctors specialising in post-viral illness in Sweden this work has been overwhelming and vital.
Sick Text meditates on the world Diktgymnasiet now inhabits and the whole scale change they have gone through since living with chronic health problems. In sickness, language, the foundation of their art practice became unknowable, lost, out of reach. As Diktgymnasiet describes it, ‘my writing was sick just as I was’. They had to ask themselves, ‘if reading and writing isn’t a cognitive possibility, what does this mean for the artist-writer?’ Sick Text invites us on a journey to unearth the foundational frameworks of language; exploring and creating other ways for our senses and neurological circuits to be nourished and communicated.
This exhibition has been planned years ahead in order to find accessible ways for the work to develop without exhausting the energy supply and health routines that sustain them. In chronic illness the practice of managing one's energy is called ‘spoon theory’, named by Christine Miserandino as a way to describe the impact of Lupus to her friend. If one has a daily limit of lets say 10 spoons, preparing a meal might take 2 spoons, while seeing a friend for an hour might be 10 spoons. Work or social engagements in particular can require significant energy, meaning spoons must be accounted for in the following days. The challenge and skill is how to complete a day within one’s spoon limit, to avoid triggering a backlash of symptoms.
Diktgymnasiet builds on this to develop a new methodology for how to relate and work with language. It is a practice in which reading means words are now treated as images, and writing is a process of collage. Diktgymnasiet calls this methodology ‘spoonreading and writing’. It involves constant negotiation, managing limits, bargaining spoons from one day to enable them to work the next.
Sick Text traces an arc of Diktgymnasiet’s practice from before their illness to today. A practice that began as formal experimentation with language, now has evolved into an accessible method which enables them to continue working with language as collage, as painting, as video. In sickness they have been able to see how their practice can stretch and adapt to compliment an anti-ableist practice, a practice that works for disability justice.
To work with language however is to work with the tools that perpetuate ableism. It is littered with ableist words that one has to weed out. Diktgymnasiet transforms language into nutritious grounds for other ways of thinking and being. In doing so they gently encourage us to rethink the ways we reproduce the ableism that makes us all sick.
– Jenny Richards