INTRODUCTION
My research THE IMAGINED BODY, was born in 2001, twenty years ago, with the title BEAUTY IS ITSELF A CURE in an attempt to create through art, architecture and colour, a multisensory project that would bring a different point of view on human body, disease and healing.
My starting point was the histological report of a hopeless pathological cell, the scientific data of the disease that I poetically transformed with the computer and its algorithms. I was looking for a gesture of redemption, something that could find a mysterious connection between disease and beauty. The possibility of a vision that went beyond the relentless statistics and that was capable of overturning the «panic» in Echo, his nymph. In short, I was looking for a different awareness of the disease, a dialogue with the cell that took into account its polarity.
When it all began, I would never have suspected that the evolution of my research encompassing the whole human body, emotions, happiness and the holographic paradigm (a controversial hypothesis proposed by the latest scientific studies), would lead me to a multidisciplinary project with multiple applications.
Transfigured cells (cells are transformed into a map of consciousness), biological landscapes (cartographies of being in which the body is represented as a sacred object), sensitive spaces (virtual surroundings, projections where one can experience various levels of well-being), chromatic narratives (short films and different experimental techniques of visualization with colours) applied in the “therapeutic liberating laboratories” with international psychologists and therapists, have been transformed over time into a multidisciplinary project of therapy as art.
“Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, stressed the fact that reality as a matter of fact is nothing more than a holographic illusion, we could no longer claim that the mind creates consciousness (the philosophical motto cogito ergo sum). On the contrary, it would be consciousness that creates the illusory sensation of a brain, a body and any other object around us that we interpret as physical. Such a revolution in the way we study biological structures leads researchers to claim that medicine and everything we know about the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. Indeed, if the apparent physical structure of the body is nothing more than a holographic projection of consciousness, it is clear that each one of us is much more responsible for one’s own health than current knowledge in the field of medicine is willing to recognize. What we now consider miraculous healings may actually be due to a change in the state of consciousness that causes changes in the body hologram. Likewise, it may be that some controversial alternative healing techniques such as visualizations are so effective because in the holographic domain of thought, images are basically as real as reality.” (Dr. Richard J. Boylan, Consciousness and Visualization).
I am indebted to the unexpected contributions of professionals from different fields of knowledge (art critics, philosophers, anthropologists, doctors and therapists, biologists, neurobiologists, mathematicians, physicists, psychoanalysts, psychologists and theologians) who have shown interest in my work. Scientific iconography and the electron microscope have been real sources of inspiration.
The mundus imaginalis referred to is the intermundi described by Henry Corbin’s studies. It is an intermediate world, suspended between the celestial and the earthly, in which all transfigurations are possible, representations become hierophanies, displays of the sacred. The imaginary can be harmless, active imagination never is.
James Hillman and Henry Corbin’s readings allowed me to recover a philosophy of the heart, for both the seat of the true imaginatio or himma (imaginative rhetorical ability) which includes the action of meditating, imagining, planning, craving; in other words, to have something in the thymus, which symbolically represents the life force, the soul, the heart, the intention, the thought, the desire.
The study of texts related to Iranian worldviews, Ib’n Arabi, Sohravardi and especially Najmoddin Kobrâ, an 11th century mystic, have contributed to an artistic work that is even more attentive to the phenomena of light and colour.
As I had already foretold, my research was not an achievement but the beginning of something. It all started as a project on active imagination and the body in order to create through art (a discipline crossing many borders) a healthy and transformed body. This was only the starting point.