Hosting Hysteria

Abstract

González defines the intersemiotic translation method she calls “gHosting”, a play of words referring to the hosting of a ghost in her own body. Through it, she rediscovers the voice of the hysterical patient within the extant historical clinical material, the written case histories of Sigmund Freud, and the drawings and photographs at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, which categorise the stages of “La grande hysterie” in their female patients. She applies this method to the creation of one-to-one durational performance works. Starting with Freud’s case histories and Charcot’s drawings as source, and drawing on psychoanalytic theory and Sophie Calle’s work “Take Care of Yourself”, she finds Augustine, Emmy von N. and Dora in between the written and traced lines, and listens attentively.