The Hysterical Arch The hysterical arch is the involuntary backward bend of the body at the height of unbearable pressure. Medicine recorded it as a symptom. It can also be read as a geometry of survival: the most extreme shape the body takes so that it does not break. On a large panel washed in vertical layers of grey, a body of straw, gauze and bandages arches out from the surface. It never fully emerges and never sinks back, but stays at the threshold between appearing and disappearing. The materials were chosen because they behave the way a body behaves. Gauze stretches until its inner threads show. Straw stiffens and stays brittle. Bandages keep the memory of contact without saying whose it was. In the arch, the critical point becomes visible. The body stiffens under what it carries, and yet the curve is a way of yielding, a bending that keeps it from shattering. What the work shows is the shape pain takes when it has never been spoken: when it has stayed in the body because there were no words for it, and no one there to hear it.