Disturbance: Francesca Magilani

 

Disturbance is a research about the visual representation of the perceptions induced by migraine aura. I do suffer from migraine, and between late 2012 and early 2013 I have been struck by a severe headache, which lasted without interruption for about eight months. For the first time in my life I experienced the aura.

     The migraine aura consist in a series of symptoms – visual, sensory and linguistic symptoms – quite often characterized by hallucinations. The first experience with the aura can be very scary, because the first thing people think is to have a brain tumor or that they are going insane. And that is one of the reasons why I decided to focus on migraine. This work in fact, allowed me to grown my knowledge on the topic and, at the same time, to do something that could actually help people to better understand their own migraine. I think that a better knowledge on something that affects you, can really help you to control it better.

     When I started developing the project, the first thing I did, even before defining what I was going to do, was to make a statement with myself. I wanted to make a tool, something useful that could help to facilitate the communication between someone who has migraine and someone who does not. So I started talking with some specialists and with many people who suffer from migraine. Face to face, but also online. Many of them told me that one of the most frustrating things was the struggle to try to explain by words what only them could feel and see. And that is how I started working on a system of illustrations that represent the migraine aura.

     The illustrations, collected in the edition, represent the disturbance and they can show an evolution, or just a single photogram of it. They show just one disturbance at the time, but migraine aura is almost always composed by several disturbances combined. The posters show the combination of different disturbances and they are the portraits of some of the people who told me their stories.

     Every element that compose the book is made in order to ergonomically adapt to the patient needs. The format, the amount of white and black of the pages, the weight and the color of the font and of the paper. All these elements are combined to do not interfere with the contents.

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