chronic pleasure, or desire paths to hack into the painframe of things

prarthana mitra

i am prarthana, a neuro-queer chronically disabled artist writing from new delhi, india, where i live with my chosen family and my kitchen garden of earthly delights / i design narrative systems and ecosystems around feminist tech for a living, and i’m currently in residency with the digital narratives studio (hong kong) and goethe institute (india) to reimagine ai-human relationalities.

my work as a maker intersects constantly with themes of bodies, rights, and justice and i love bridging tech-critical and decolonial perspectives with explorations of memory, identity, and affect, like in chronic pleasure – an internet art project that i am building to document the fragmented nature of living with chronic illness and how centering radical disobedience and pleasure has been restorative for my journey.

chronic pleasure, or desire paths to hack into the painframe of things

cesaire said, the apocalypse is an opening, a desire to begin. so maybe this is as good a place to start as any, (with a metaphor for pain: tower on fire, cue chaos, and a future less-whole; for non-tarot enthusiasts, here’s another image: ghost towns, like the negative space of networks, dream-like and illegible.)

whatever happened to friction, the noise between nodes and edges? the gangly things without which no elegant thing would exist? the moments of wreckage, crisis, and breakdown where systems (and their flaws) become apparent?

lately, i’ve found myself rummaging through the interstices of excess, the lost and found section at the back of my mind, for poem-shaped clues to help decipher the ancient language of fatigue (psa: read the small print), like a compassing ritual that’s set course for pleasure and its many consonant sounds — community, creativity, activism, rest, care, kink, stims, other future-unnamed forms — entailing something of a radical reimagination of pain, to stop feeding it more sadness and silence:

diagnosis begins long before filling out the pain index at the clinic, or as i love to say, personal constriction before personal re-construction. it begins with a series of tiny raptures and beachcombing through big feelings (“is loss really a bigger feeling than love?”) or tiring of rituals that require a performance of identicality (mother, is this autistic burnout?) and getting better at making yourself small and invisible…

we are probably getting ahead of ourselves but that’s okay (cue titles after intermission)

it has taken everything to commit to the conceit of disease as disobedience but i’d be lying if i didn’t say i had help; the lorde commanded me to name my tyrannies, and in the blinding light of all my brilliant, refracted, drifting states (insert position statement: queer and nonbinary / dysphoric and cystic / crawling on the spectrum, through criptime / class-weary)

pleasure bathed and fed and swaddled me through the narrative discomfort of familial dysfunction and a world deformed by capitalism (rerouting to new desire paths: i quit my dream job and picked up a new skill, took up ghost jobs to pay my bills, made time for rest and showing up for friends, made spaces for chronic oversharing, made myself vast again, the many loves of a body in pain, mediated through the tender, speculative geometries of kink, desires expanding beyond function and error, wrote intensely about my pain, its origins and textures, and from these fragments, chronic pleasure emerged, waging intimacies through an unreliable interface, the body)

its spirit spurring me to launch a surreal journey in the creative industry; (f.a.q.: a first-generation artist, in this economy?) (artist portfolio: to make visible all that i’ve done is to foreclose on all that i can be)

self-historiographies as a pleasuring practice led me to unexpectedly rich vibrant matter that had eroded over time, and the rhetoric of denial and shame and guilt untethered itself to make room for tender semiotics of grief and uncertainties:

embracing the role of a drifter — like the wise slacker girl of indie films or the colourful (unnamed) gig working protagonist in hilary leichter’s temporary — or how by refusing to belong to productivity-centric dystopias that demand health, i have never belonged more.

i rewrote my dreams and i never stopped being faithful to my journey.

today a gnarly tree sprouts in the shade of the tower, unabashed of what the elements may bring.

desire paths shaped by*: ≰ the audre lorde questionnaire to oneself x audre lorde ≰ poor artists x the white pube ≰ pleasure activism x adrienne maree brown ≰ actor network theory x bruno latour ≰ temporary x hilary leichter ≰ strangers x rebecca tamas ≰ chronic illness memes on the internet ≰ films by derek jarman and jonas mekas *not an exhaustive list