Elasticus Contagiosa, 2025

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Elasticus Contagiosa reimagines Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) as a documented contagion in an alternate 18th century. Through anatomical drawings, copper etchings, and lino-print warning posters, the installation asks, what if an invisible condition suddenly became visible to society?

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Insects become metaphors for invisible illness throughout the work. Paper wasps inhabit neural pathways, symbolising shooting nerve pain. Centipedes coil around vertebrae, representing constricting sensations. Drain flies gather in cardiac chambers, expressing consuming fatigue. Cicadas feed on structural roots, indicating kidney dysfunction and pressure. These anatomical-entomological hybrids make invisible pain viscerally real.

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This installation operates across two contrasting spaces. The first room presents a fictional 18th-century contagion response. In this alternate history, EDS receives the same systematic documentation that Carl Linnaeus applied to the classification of organisms, rather than the dismissal people with invisible symptoms continue to face within colonial medical systems. The second room reveals current reality. A projected Auslan interpretation explains that EDS is real, what the exhibition explores, and that diagnostic delays average 10 to 12 years. A community participation wall invites visitors to document their invisible illness journeys, creating living evidence of systematic medical neglect.

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Drawing from 18th-century anatomical and natural history illustration and Surrealism, the installation functions as autopathography, transforming lived experience into protest. If society could envision treating EDS urgently in a fictional past, why does the present still fail us?