Description

Empathographies: Using body art related video approaches in the environment of an Austrian teaching hospital

CHRISTINA LAMMER

MedArt/somafilm and Medical Media Services, Medical University Vienna, Vienna, Austria

ABSTRACT

In this article, I introduce video as an ethnographic method of translating human experiences of illness and suffering into an aesthetic language. Interviewing physicians and patients in different clinical fields with the help of a video camera is embedded in the research project CORPOrealities (2004–2009), which I carry out together with a team of visual artists, curators, historians and caregivers at Medical University Vienna (MUV). I ask clinicians and patients to teach health professionals and medical students by using video as a tool of self-reflection. Selected video footage is regularly discussed among clinical personnel who are invited to participate in interdisciplinary workshops. These visual ethnographic interventions illuminate apparently opposed perceptible and expressible realities in the physician–patient relationship. With the application of such sensory and body art related methods we aim to enhance complex processes of translation and mediation and strengthen the empathy, sensitivity and emotional competence in health care work.

Keywords: Experience, sensory ethnography, body art, reconstructive surgery, performance, socio- and psychosomatics, emotional competence.