La relación entre la lesión y la identidad

Abstract

This work explores and investigates the body as a territory inscribed with multiple forms of violence—physical, emotional, and social. Taking as a point of departure a key biographical event—the occurrence of a herniated disc—this research develops an inquiry that links physical collapse to broader processes of accumulated bodily deterioration. The spinal injury functions here as both a theoretical and practical axis, allowing an examination of how the systematic mistreatment of the body manifests on both organic and symbolic levels. This project navigates the intersection between medical studies on physical trauma, the phenomenology of the suffering body, and autobiographical approaches that are exposed through performance. From this transdisciplinary perspective, it proposes a critical reflection that questions how far our bodies can be pushed under excessive demands, while simultaneously exploring how pain can become a creative material. Performance thus emerges not as a mere act of representation, but as a methodology of embodied knowledge—dematerializing the clinical diagnosis in order to reconstruct it as a sensorial experience. In this work, the wound of a herniated disc is not the only one exposed; it also reveals the experience of less visible forms of violence, such as habits of self-neglect, normalized labor pressures, and familial wounds that transform into personal demands. By focusing on a concrete bodily experience, the research seeks to unravel the complex relationships between biography, health, and artistic creation, challenging the discourses that separate the clinical from the lived. The injured body is thus revealed as both archive and testimony—a space where violence is inscribed and from which it can be read.