New Face is a story about a woman who has undergone a face transplant. It was written as a reflection on the exhibition Intermittent, as if a space of time could not be occupied by two bodies by Dongyoung Lee and Michiel Hilbrink, for ProjectProbe, 2018
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I’ve got a new face. My own’s gone. Chewed off by my dog. The new face is strange to me. The mouth is not my mouth. Chewing food in this mouth is like licking someone else’s plate. The saliva trickling from these cheeks isn’t mine. It is my meal mixed with somebody else’s spit. It’s strange to be here, inside of this mouth, with my own tongue. A hair is growing from my chin. There was never a hair on my chin. Not one. The hair is black and it curls. What to do with it? Cut it off? Pull it out? Let it grow? I’ve decided to let it grow. Just so I’ll know what it’s like to have a hair on my chin. I play with it. I pull it. I don’t feel a thing. No pain. No itching. The nerves connecting my chin to my brain are dead. Better yet, they were never there to start with. Perhaps there will be, the doctors tell me. Every relationship needs time.
When I speak, I can hear we’re not quite there yet. Speaking needs time, too. Whenever I try to say something, the face says something. But my words sound different. There is a lisp trailing my sentences. At night I’m sleeping with a stranger. In the morning I rub the sleep from my eyes. The eyes are mine still. The eyes that previously belonged to this face are no longer around. At least, not as far as I know. Those eyes are the hollows in which I live… (Excerpt).
Read the whole text on Projectprobe.net
