Edith Gudbrand

It can’t be controlled. I bring forth life, and I surrender to the course of events. I don’t want everything that is happening; it happens anyway. My body continues without me, in the hands of others, beyond my will. I view it as if from a distance, unable to stop it. I am stuck in something I cannot opt out of.

In my work “Diagnosis Code 0821”, I’ve chosen to explore feelings, thoughts and experiences from an emergency caesarean section I had on 31 January 2026 at 6:09 a.m. In that moment, my body became an object that was dissolved into parts and functions. In the operating room, I was reduced to skin, incisions and blood loss; a procedure and a medical condition.

There is a strange shift in being seen as a body that has to be handled, rather than someone who is alive. As if the body were separate from the self; as if pain could be measured without a story.

In this experience, I slide between being human and material; between subject and object. Sometimes almost animalistic in my exposure and vulnerability; sometimes reduced to something that must be fixed. And somewhere there I am simultaneously lost and found.