Visualising trauma: looking back at unconscious vs conscious portrayals

I see the remnants of what my life looked like before. I see the relationships which lasted, those that didn’t, and the way my life was inextricably shaped by the trauma which sat inside and around me, dictating my situations. As a filmmaker, I have a variety of material which I can reflect upon, and in which I can see reflections of my internal world.

Initial reflections and circular motions

I was once called a “nazi” by one of my classmates at school for having German heritage. This taunt, albeit unpleasant and confusing, made me reflect on my German roots, on what it meant to be German with the legacy of National Socialism. I spoke to my grandma and saw in her the fear of what that ignorance to violence meant, and how “what we just didn’t know” culminated in. In my art A-Level, I ended up making a piece about the dangers of ideology, using my whole body as a photogram on imagery of a train line (which led to a camp) in my grandma’s village in Bavaria.

When I started my BA, I remember being fascinated by the idea that our “condition” could dictate our creative outcome. Monet's water lily series were apparently the outcome of his ensuing blindness – he was unable to see further than the reflections on the pond. I translated this idea of physical inadequacy into a philosophical need, creating some disjointed pieces on the disconnect between humans and (their true) nature.

My work was in some way guided by Nietzsche’s concept of the “eternal return” – that each decision we make should be guided by the idea that we would be doomed to repeat it for time immemorial. This concept would also be prominently influenced by an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles. I remember one of my teachers drawing a spiral to represent ordinary life experience – the circular spiral went horizontally across the white board. By handing oneself over to transcendental philosophy (Emerson, Thoreau, or even Nietzsche would do), he said, this circularity would hopefully start to move vertically – the spiral rising. It was through understanding the circle that we would be able to move out of it and transcend into more spiritual circles.

I felt the circle. I felt it every time I tried to be brave, and fell short. I felt it as an end to my enjoyment, and my necessary punishment. I felt it when I was inhibited by interpersonal relationships, and through failure retreated into myself. I felt it when I became too visible, and created success, and needed to reduce myself to invisibility again, to safety. I would rise again one day, but until I could figure out the clue to release myself from the circle I would perpetually be stuck in it. I used the circle as a justification for why much of the world was out of sync, why we were waging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and why society was unjust.

Unconsciously exploring trauma

Utilising video film loops (essentially playing on repeat), my film installations look Sisyphean. A man walking up a tower to the top, seeing there is no release, retrieving a bag, and walking backwards down the tower, having the bag be picked up by himself on the way back up; it looks like someone running in a circle around a block, sometimes as if being chased, but there is no one chasing him except the camera. It looks like a man desperately sure he can stop the tide coming in, screaming at the Thames (a take on the story of King Canute, who would later drown). I wrote cyclical narratives in which words would repeatedly be echoed – words about violence, about having “been here before”, about not being able to escape.

I also made a film based off of a Doris Lessing text in which the words “I love you”, “Why did you say that?”, “I just wanted to hear what it sounded like” are repeated on a manual loop, with each character swapping the role over and over like automatons unable to flee the lack of sentiment. It looked like disassociation and felt like disassociation. I know that now because I can see that’s where I was for many years, completely unable to meet emotion, unable to contact my body, like a ghost walking through the city hoping for connection (I made a film about that too). 

What I find more complicated is that I tackled all these deeply personal topics unconsciously through my films and wrapped them all up in supposed theory and philosophy. I can see now why my tutors may have had issues with my work, and why I struggled to find my place on a conceptual art degree. I had more or less found intellectual justifications for my body malfunctioning, unable to cope with the information it was carrying; vindications for why I was afraid of living fully. I had also unintentionally used the camera to mediate and communicate my life as it was influenced by trauma.

I continued, and struggled making work for the next decade after I left art school – feeling both compelled and determined to do it, whilst being deeply inhibited by it. My work seemed to be stuck behind a wall of misunderstanding, a dark-tinted quadruple glazed window that prevented people from seeing it, seeing me fully. I felt like I was trying to find the right language to communicate that deep expression I knew was present, but couldn’t articulate. Things started to change once I finally realised I was living with trauma, even if I wouldn’t have called it trauma back then. I knew that unless I confronted it head on, I would be held hostage by trauma.

Consciously owning trauma

In 2018, I started work on a film explicitly exploring trauma itself to show what it looked like to me. I used conscious reenactment to stage one element of my experience, an experience that was hard but was certainly not the core of my traumatic experiences. I worked with the idea that this ripple event was just a reflection of the same core trauma, the original traumatic experiences. I directed the episode multiple times with myself creating and playing the roles of witness, perpetrator and aggressor (vaguely utilising psychodramatic techniques here). I created and recreated the circle through the edit, of what it means to remember, how it feels to be triggered and how seditious trauma can be. 

Unintentionally again, but perhaps spurred on by my tutor (I made this as part of an MA), I wrote into the film the possibility of an exit. I allowed myself to play the audience, and to see and recognise that the experience was circular, and by seeing this myself, the circle could be disrupted. I began to understand that I didn’t need to keep re-experiencing abuse, or recreate unsafe situations for myself, at least theoretically. This “conscious” filmmaking showed me that overcoming violence wasn’t just about naming it, nor about remembering it as an act of reconciliation. It was about consciously working and owning all the parts of me, even the ones which felt inappropriate or shameful. It was about accepting that in many cases I had been upholding my own abuse for a long time and that by accepting and owning all of my experience honestly, I could begin to heal.

Disrupting the circle and surfacing trauma

Healing wasn’t exactly what I thought it would look like. Memories of abuse came forward, from an age earlier than I had ever recognised. Disrupting the circle gave me access to these, and I began to see my life much more clearly. 

In the autumn of 2021, a film I had shot of my niece playing a fairy, a film I had made in 2005, suddenly became eerily reminiscent. I had shot the film on a handheld Sony DV Cam in the park I played in as a child. It was a film I had largely forgotten about, made in a haze of homegrown skunk and Camden-bought psilocybin. At the time, I remember telling my art tutors that the film was about ‘the loss of innocence’ – whose I couldn’t say. I was asked why ‘it was a little girl, and not a boy?’. I said that was ‘incidental’, and ‘not relevant’. And it was placed to the side, as another of the feminised curiosities I would make that year.

A DV video is playing in black and white. We see a young, light-haired girl, perhaps five years old, in her bedroom surrounded by toys. On her shelf she picks up a small jewellery box. She opens it to reveal an oval mirror facing back to her, and a fairy ballerina twirling in the middle to mechanical music.

She watches it longingly. We cut to the girl running around a wooded area in a fairy costume – wings and a tutu. She watches the world around, enchanted by her magic wand which she waves and points to command the other creatures, creatures we can’t see. We see her dancing around a fallen willow tree. We see her spinning. She closes her eyes as dizziness ensues. We see her lying, eyes closed on a tarmac floor as the camera circles around her. We see her slamming the music box shut. 

Looking at the video in retrospect, what I saw was a reenactment of my first experience of sexual abuse. The film captured the breaking of the fantasy and innocence of childhood. The location it took place in was the location where I believe the assault took place. The film even included my sense of sexual disorientation, a fairy in place for a faggot. 

Creating for survival and healing

Recognising the innate power of trauma in influencing my creativity feels difficult. It feels like it could be another area in which agency was taken away from me – an ideology or a condition which had taken effect. Considering that I had always had a fascination with this concept, that I too could be held by it, feels somewhat short-sighted but also shows how hard it was to access. Looking at my work in retrospect has also shown me how little control I had over myself during those years, how truly overwhelmed my system was. 

If I look at all this from another angle, however, it’s also deeply wonderful to see how my body and my mind worked with creativity to try and process what was taking place for me internally. Whether or not I had the power to engage with it directly, that healing drive was happening, trying to find a way through for me. In a way, it was trying to give me the validation I needed. I will freely admit that in some way I don’t have the same drive to create as I used to – and I can see that might be because my life isn’t depending on it anymore.

— Julian Triandafyllou