Outputs

9-12 September 2026
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam & De Doelen Rotterdam
 

I will be presenting a paper at the inaugural Graphic Medicine Europe conference. 

My topic is:  Holding Without Resolving: Snapshot Forms Beyond Illness Narrative

Abstract:
Illness is often made legible through narrative: crisis, interpretation, transformation, recovery. Within
medical humanities and graphic medicine, narrative is a powerful and effective way to make sense of
experience, but its dominance can also impose coherence where it does not naturally exist, or
foreclose meanings that have not yet had time to emerge. What happens when illness experience does
not want to become a story?

This paper explores a set of fragment-based visual and textual practices developed after prolonged
hospitalisation and post-acute recovery. Rather than organising experience into chronology or
resolution, the work is grounded in a “snapshot principle”: discrete, bounded units - images, notes,
and memory-fragments - that preserve the texture of experience without subordinating it to a narrative
arc. These fragments include bodily details, institutional traces, retrospective recognitions, and
moments whose significance remains unstable.

The paper does not reject meaning-making, but defends its right to take forms and timescales
appropriate to the experience itself. In this sense, the snapshot operates not as an absence of form,
but as a deliberate mode of containment: holding experience without prematurely resolving it.

The discussion draws on three practice-based artefacts that address different dimensions of post-acute
experience. Each responds to a distinct constraint on experience - systemic, perceptual, and
retrospective - an interactive model that maps the logic of early convalescence over time; a fragment-based
visual journal capturing memory under perceptual and cognitive constraint; and a series of nonlinear
self-portraits exploring emergent shifts in self-understanding. Taken together, these forms
demonstrate how experience can be mediated without consolidation into narrative.

Responding to the themes of imagination, mediation, and manifestation, the paper proposes that
fragmentary and non-linear forms may offer a more faithful account of recovery as lived: partial,
iterative, and resistant to closure.