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The concept of 'progressive universal poetry', developed by the poet Novalis and the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel during the German Romantic period, forms the theoretical basis of this artistic research project. According to this concept, the poetic process of creation ultimately involves transforming the body and its organs into tools for modifying the world.
The ‘PA' (poetical anamnesis), a technique I developed for the practical part, draws on this idea and conceptualizes the autoimmune body as a modified and therefore poetic body. Consequently the symptoms of an autoimmune disease are understood as articulations of this modification, as signs of a starting transformation of the body into a poetical means of world creation. The goal of the PA is to capture the poem of the autoimmune body and to (re)construct the patient as transformative serial poetry.
