Photography
New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing
Live Antibody Photography Series
New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing [c.2018] is a 130-day photo–assemblage series made within successive 24-hour intervals. Each arrangement was composed and photographed during the brief “warm-up” window when the antibody left the refrigerator before injection: a 15-minute creative and medical constraint that shaped the entire rhythm of the project.
The series functioned as disclosure and radical exposure: an attempt to normalize the shame and isolation surrounding daily injections, a stigma carried since early childhood. Through repetition, improvisation, and domestic materials, the images reframe medical ritual as both ordinary and mythic.
Before the post-pandemic mainstreaming of “injection culture” Botox, Wegovy, vitamin drips, medical aesthetics - the hashtag #NewPsychedeliaofIndustrialHealing offered its own form of public online visibility.
It unfolded as a daily online event where people could “tune in” to the digital algorithm and witness an evolving practice of survival, radical intimacy, and anti-shame architecture.
Within each image, the antibody becomes the “visible subject,” the star of the frame, while the disabled body remains deliberately off-camera, non voyeristic, privacy protected. This inversion, exposing the ‘anti-body’ challenges what aspects of disabled bodies, are permitted to be seen, and under what terms.
A selection from the larger body invites viewers to stay with the experiment:
Who defines celebration while policing the expression of the disabled?
130 photos are paired with meditative prose reflecting on childhood stigma, lifelong treatment, and the psychic terrain of a medically tethered existance.
Meditative Pprose & Image Descriptions [ID] available for each of the series photos.
Transcription: Gallery 44 / Images Festival Interview (2019)
March 29 – April 27, 2019
Sharona Franklin’s work disseminates a personal mythology of gender, class, bio-citizenship, and botany. Her work is reflexive to propaganda, transhumanism and bioethics, working to expand contemporary interpretations of genetic engineering. In 2016 Franklin published a book of visual prose titled Rental Bod.
Curated by Steffanie Ling
Artistic Director, Images Festival
Presented in partnership with the Images Festival
Steffanie Ling: New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing is a concept that was written in 2015 and first appeared in the pages of Rental Bod, published in 2016, then formalized as a bio-ritual on your Instagram account in 2017. How is a bio-ritual distinct from a daily practice?
Sharona Franklin: A daily practice isn’t living. You can brush your teeth and light a candle, but they’re not “bio”. I’m handling drugs that contain living cells, or antibodies, which is why it is referred to as a bio-ritual. I think of the drugs as an antibody, or a non-body, they don’t have a body until they get mine. Its depiction is the only control I have over it; by putting something that is usually invisible, inside my body, and making it visible using photography and social media.
SL: The images are playfully composed with mass-produced objects that are cheaply made and sold. Among these relatable household items are rare life-sustaining drugs that are only available to a fraction of the population, and accessible to a fraction of a fraction of that population who rely on them to live, and only after being subject to an incredibly complex bureaucratic system.
SF: As opposed to consumer, I’d like to use the word banal and sentimental objects. A lot of those objects aren’t mass produced, there is a combination of many sources. In terms of the accessibility of the biopharmaceuticals, it’s important to say that many of the drugs prescribed to me were not developed until the late 90s, early 00s. Before biopharmaceutical drugs were developed, doctors prescribed me chemotherapy, steroids, and anti-malarials for the first two years of my diagnosis. Biopharmaceuticals are more commonly prescribed now, but they had not yet been approved and developed until shortly after my initial diagnosis. I was one of the first prepubescent people in the world to take these drugs as they were developed in the 90s and it’s really not known what that trajectory genetically will be. They were and are still considered “miracle drugs,” also luxury drugs. The term is kind of euphemizing to my reality, because to live with degenerative diseases is not a luxury, and granting any hope to survive that shouldn’t be considered a luxury. I’m aware of first world access; being a white woman in Canada. There is guilt in accessing these meds, but in order to, I have to give up all of my body’s information in full agency to the pharmaceutical companies who keep the prices of these drugs high because the diseases are rare, my body helps build data, and economic value.
SL: The work undoes some of the conventionally negative associations with medical iconography, such as the “scary needle.” What other acts of articulation, de-mystification, and perhaps even alternative educations might depart and circulate from this project?
SF: It’s important regarding needles, especially because they are associated with crime, danger, and misuse. For example, there are always warnings about how needles need to be kept away from babies or children, but I was a child using needles all the time. When people say to me, this shouldn’t be for kids, I just think about how I was a kid taking needles. They’re held in such sterile places, and documented in ways that are dehumanizing and inhuman. On the box it says keep away from children, but I want to say that anyone could handle one, because if it’s for me, and that makes me part of everyone, then that makes me someone.
SL: There is an erotic side to this work, if I am recalling correctly from our earlier conversations. Gathering the materials, positioning them, and photographing them have a kind of boudoir photography feel, but I know there is great depth to how they’re produced. How would you say the agency to depict antibodies changes your relationship to them?
SF: Whenever I conduct one of the bio-rituals, it feels like I’m organizing a play date for the cells because they only ever exist within boxes and fridges. It’s a ceremony for them before they begin “working” for me. So, it’s also a way to honor them, maybe like a temporary temple. I’ve also looked at them more than I ever have in my life. Normally, I wouldn’t have to face them like this because they’re boxed, or in the fridge. As opposed to a pill bottle, you carry it, you put it on the counter. These you don’t do that with, so you don’t actually get to look at them for very long. I would set up the collage prior to bringing the needle out of refrigeration, as they’re living cells, so they can only survive at room temp a short amount of minutes before it goes into my body. Some of the antibodies I receive can’t be exposed to room temperature for more than 8 minutes. It’s exposure therapy to sit with them. Not just inject them right away. No one would encourage me to have a healthier relationship to needles, rather than being purely submissive to them as medicine, or perpetuate the stigmatization of not speaking about them. Before, they were for my body, but now it can be potentially educational, or for “beauty” if you want to think of it that way. It’s also somewhat utilitarian. It also seems like I can get more out of it if I photograph them.
SL: There’s also agency in the framing of it, we are only able to see as much of this part of your life as you are willing to share through this work.
SF: All the peripheral is removed, it can be about removing noise. It’s hard to tell where these objects have been assembled, and for what purpose. Maybe it’s a bit like a peep show—you only get to see a tiny, controlled portion of my lived experience because there is tons of other stuff happening in the space that relates to my day-to-day life and survival which is happening right outside the frame of that image.
SL: The objects exist in this kind of non-place, so they retain much of their visual potency while viewed in any context or space. You’ve spoken about these images as a means to interrogate the algorithm. The value put on personal information is a driving force behind the medical bureaucracy you described, but it also operates in a similar way to the technology you employ for the project also contributes to the economy of Big Data.
SF: When it comes to the Internet, and the healthcare system, I’m going to be exploited no matter what. Those are the margins that this is produced within, and how I attempt to evidence disabled lived experience. I was the first person to ever hashtag #juvenilestillsdisease, #recombinantdna, #interleukin1, within that one only three including mine are medical related.
Another really strange thing about the access to these drugs is they’re super expensive, and a lot of people can’t even access them. There are two boards in Canada where you have to present all your medical information and they decide if you have access or not. My access has been decided on a 12-month basis every single year. For the last 20 years of my life I’ve had annual reviews to retain my access. The boards monitor you because the only incentive for them to fund me is to own all my medical information. I have to sign waivers saying that any information about my body can be used at any time, for anything. You kind of feel owned by the thing that’s helping you. Relative to basic government assistance, these drugs are infinitely more expensive than what the government considers the value of a basic living. The thing keeping you alive is just this medicine. Up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year are going into just what’s going into my body but then it’s still pretty hard to access social assistance as a disabled person. It’s this ironic thing you get trapped in.
SL: If we search those hashtags, they’re mostly, if not all, of your images from this project and of disability memes you’ve made. How does technology account for emotive production?
SF: By bringing in anything ceremonial or somewhat esoteric, it combats the scientific nature of what the work is about. It’s a technology of living, that’s why it’s called “bio-technology.” Rhetorician Kenneth Burke says that no scientific information is unbiased because humans create with emotion. Whether you share it in fractions, lists, or decimals, they determine the inherent emotive creativity in it. There is spirit in data itself. Data doesn’t exist, it is produced by humans. Through a method of interpretive communication studies called dramatism, we can understand drama as emotion. This is how rhetoricians try to find flaws in science. For example, if you’re reading a peer review, you look for the agent C; agent is the producer of the work, agent C is the one bankrolling the work. Humans creating data is a form of theatre. And possible answers to questions of why people act at all, and finding motivations of actions. It’s living and produced by living people, which is something the layman refuses to see, because they see technology as something that is predetermined.
SL: How have you responded to notions regarding the aestheticization of biopharmaceuticals?
SF: An aspect of the project celebrates the medical advances that sustain my life. People celebrate the food they eat, and honour, or pray to it, or whatever. Whereas for me, food exclusively won’t sustain me. It’s upsetting to receive resentment towards my access, or my representation or appreciation for what I’m using for a better life.
SL: What are some of the questions people always ask you, that feel like they come up all the time?
SF: People often ask me what living with a disability is like. Living with a disability is like living within different dimensions. It’s living in another paradigm, not an additional issue to an able life, it’s a holistically different existence. “How do you do all the stuff you do?” I make many, many sacrifices and I don’t do a lot of preparation or planning, but I am prepared to accept a lot of flaws in what I’m making; I think the idea of making something perfect is classist anyway, just as the privileging of perfect bodies is classist.
More information on Sharona Franklin and New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing can be found at gallery44.org and imagesfestival.com.
All work in the vitrines and image above:
Sharona Franklin, New Psychedelia of Industrial Healing, 2018.