Bless You
A self-initiated editorial study of the sneeze as the body's involuntary refusal of everything we have learned to live with.
→ Culture
Allergies are rising and there is no single reason for it. The research points in several directions at once. Ultra-processed diets, pollution, and a hygiene culture that left immune systems under-trained and quick to overreact. We have normalised a low hum of toxicity in ordinary life and sold it back to ourselves as convenience. Processed food, synthetic fabric, industrial air, next-day everything. The body has started to object.
The sneeze is the smallest visible unit of that objection. It arrives before the mind has formed a view. Something in the body does not belong and the reflex has already ruled on it. We don't read it that way. We read it as an interruption to our control, cover it up with our arms, and apologise.
There is a second thing worth noticing. The sneeze is the one involuntary climax we are embarrassed by. It builds and releases with the same mechanics we celebrate elsewhere in the body, and yet the socially agreed response is excuse me. A culture this invested in composure was always going to have a problem with it. That discomfort is the subject of this work.
→ Creativity
The work pairs two things that are not usually placed together. On one side, a still life of the irritants we have agreed to accept: pollen, penicillin, dairy, dust, the everyday exposures dressed up as essentials. On the other, portraits caught in the involuntary half-second around a sneeze, subjects held in buttoned vintage tailoring so composure and its collapse sit inside one frame. The tailoring is doing the argument, holding a line the body is about to break.
The film noir aesthetic dramatises this bodily villain moving amongst us.
The written piece that runs alongside the images reads as a sermon, playing on the blessing we offer after a sneeze. The subject is the moment the body takes over from the brain, so the language is built to lose its composure too. The writing is meant to echo the bodily reaction of a sneeze.
CREDITS: PRODUCER: Rachael Evans. POEM: James Massiah. MOVEMENT DIRECTOR: Yagamoto. DIRECTOR: Aaron Christian. SOUND: Toot
