CAUSE UNKNOWN

DES BAINS

3 April - 8 May 2025

Link to exhibition Text by Lu Rose Cunningham

photography by studio adamson

close my eyes and imagine movement 2025

pencil, soft pastel and holographic vinyl on reflective fabric

Cause Unknown—an answer to the question, the result of an investigation, or the negation of a cure? Lara Smithson’s work explores historical and contemporary contradictions between health, ritual, religious fervor and guilt, divine and political power, and the impact of these discrepancies on the human condition. The exhibition of fabric drawings forms a set for her video installation, within which she examines two misunderstood medical phenomena from opposing periods of time: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) and Choreomania (the dancing plague).

The latter remains a mystery to this day, with outbreaks occurring across Europe between the 11th and 17th centuries during times of extreme hardship, superstition, and plague. The sufferers danced themselves to collapse—even death. Paradoxically, ME is characterized by debilitating fatigue that is not alleviated by rest. It was only classified in the last century, with its pathology remaining unexplained, making it a highly stigmatized condition.

The installation draws on Smithson’s lived experience and recovery from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. Relapse and falling are mirrored in the drawings—running drops of water or tears leak out of the works and onto costumes, danced into the video Cause Unknown.

Smithson’s work engages with the conflict between mind/body and past/present. In one drawing, a saint’s reliquary emerges from a brain scan, also blinking in and out of the video work. Reliquaries are seen as having the power of speech—or at least a voice. In the drawings contained within enlarged sewing patterns strewn with medical gloves, hands hold ribbons of looping text: “Feel my blood and become a body for you”—also the title of the piece.

The surfaces of the drawings resemble veils of sky, fur, and skin, some made from rubbings of Icelandic fish leathers. Revealing and concealing, skin is the largest and heaviest organ—a porous barrier for both humans and animals, one of the first lines of protection against disease. A drawn triptych doubles as a costume performed in the video, with ravens’ voices unfurling as sound echoed in the soundtrack, sung by Isabelle Pead.

Filmed in a deconsecrated church, a circular track contains the choreography, cycling and echoing the camera’s orbits—a restless fatigue. Dance becomes a performance of hope or hopelessness, an exploration of control over the body and the fine line between… falling… slipping… relapse.