07 Set The mutilated faces of the Great War. Lost identities, restored identities. A gripping workshop in Durham on Sept 18th
What happens to your identity when your face gets badly mutilated and loses its form? What happens to your identity when your nearly formless face is more or less restored to a form which is and is not its/your form? The Great War was a cruel mass laboratory on the relationship between the face, the body schema, personal identity and social identity. A seminar organized by the University of Durham and the Wellcome Trust deals with the “gueules de bois” from the perspective of the reparative and compensatory dilemmas of war surgery. IL CORPO will return to this in its Section Paranoiac-critical Diary and in a review of a recent Italian book. As of now, it is worth to pay attention to this workshop. The organizer and rapporteur Suzannah Biernoff, Senior Lecturer at the Dept of History of Art at Birkbeck (University of London) has been dealing for a few years with the history of the body, particularly in the Great War. More details here: https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/cmh/PotraitsViolence_Sept18.pdf
