The (Im)possibility of Healing: On Lauryn Youden

Lauryn Youden’s survival and self-care strategies span a range of epistemic modes—be they witchcraft, spirituality and mysticism, medicine and alchemy, art and theory—each enormously loaded with internal plurality and complex, overlapping histories that have been distorted by such obfuscating forces as colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. Some methods are affirmed by Western science and others by some of the many different frameworks and systems of knowledge that exceed it, including tarot, divination runes, and herbalism. Each item on display in her most recent exhibition, Visionary of Knives at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, is selected based on both embodied evidence of what works for Youden and those with whom she is in relation, in a way that is guided by cultural sensitivity. Is there a way to engage with multiple sources of cultural knowledge respectfully, and through that engagement perhaps even dismantle structures of white supremacy? What can a white chronically ill or Crip person in an ableist world adopt to ease their pain and bring healing—without fearing social retribution for looking outside the confines of Western biomedicine? These are fraught questions, but important ones, and ones that this Berlinbased, Canadian artist strives to address.

Acknowledging the integral role of learning and unlearning in community, care, and healing, the exhibition is structured around the sharing of sources—books, herbs, medicines, dried flowers, candles, and ritual-based objects—referencing the discourses, ideas, and practices of a great many others in a consensual, considerate way. While Youden is grounded, ancestrally and geographically, in European traditions, she also includes BIPOC practices, though only when and as they have been introduced to her via her queer family bonds. In the brochure that meticulously documents every object and text in the show, Youden includes a description of each item, as well as who gifted the object to her, where relevant.

Youden’s active involvement with the Sickness Affinity Group (SAG) and the Golden Dome School, among others, informs the grounding of this introspective exhibition on healing in a close community of ongoing negotiation and trust. was first intended to be a place for the queer Crip community in Berlin to physically gather. The SAG is a transnational collective of artists, activists, and theorists who are chronically ill and disabled, as well as their allies. They convene as a monthly support group, with conversational check-ins to see what people need and how they might get it. Before the pandemic hit, the group was getting too big for its current meeting space, and so Youden decided she’d open The central space of the gallery forms a resting space with large cushions for people to gather and share in conversation (it fits seven to 10 people without COVID regulations, two with); it was important to have a focus on rest in this exhibition, since it is the most important part of Youden’s daily practice of decreasing her chronic pain. The physical curation of the exhibition demarcates an absence, a sharp pathos for what was meant to be an area of physical enmeshment and embodied support. Of course, that our bodies are always already through the breath and its movement out of one person’s body and, through that shared space of the air between us, into another’s—is one of the more consequential revelations at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the language of “droplets,” we’re reminded that the boundary between where my body/microbiome ends and your body/microbiome begins is not so clear.