The foundation for the artistic research presented in this paper are anamnesis interviews that I conducted with rheumatic patients in the General Hospital Vienna.

The theory of a ‘progressive universal poetry’, formulated by Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel in the age of German Romanticism, provides the theoretical framework. It states that the poetic process of creation ultimately means to transform the body and its organs into tools of world modification.

The ‘PA – poetical anamnesis’, a technique I developed for the methodical part of the project, draws on this idea and conceptualizes the autoimmune body as a modified and therefore poetic body. Consequently the symptoms of an autoimmune disease are understood as articulations of this modification, as signs of a starting transformation of the body into a poetical means of world creation.

The goal of the PA is to capture the poem of the autoimmune body and to (re)construct the patient as transformative serial poetry.

This article has been published in the Anthology „Mend, Blend, Attend. Advancing Artistic Research„.