In Joo Young Lee’s Body Keeps the Score, omniscient pigeons narrate an urban landscape with devastatingly common attributes to many of those we dwell in today. The city in which these pigeons reside is a version of Italo Calvino’s “Leona” from his novel, Invisible Cities. The work is named after The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D. whose extensive trauma research is accompanied with various modalities for healing. 

The film opens with the sound of subways rumbling along their tracks, as black and white pigeons emerge from an encasement. The pigeons begin to narrate the piece, as they surveil a city in a constant state of sanitization. The pigeons describe themselves as “in the asphalt of the pavement, the bricks of the building, the streetlamps of the city,” and while they witness each occurrence of the urban landscape, they are unseen, ignored, invisible. “No one saw me, but I saw everything they hid.” In Lee’s reworking of Calvino, she references a city which cleanses itself anew every day. A mountain of garbage lives outside of Leona, out of view, while the sterilized city, a culture of consistent denial, moves forward with each new dawn. Lee replaces the word “garbage” with “bodies” in Body Keeps the Score, critiquing the frenetic nature of the media, whose stories of death and carnage swiftly move to the next, rarely allowing the space for one to grieve the information that preceded the next reel of headlines.

Lee ushers the viewer from a dark city at night to an uncomfortable landscape of waste and detritus in black and white. What appears to be dead trees, rubble, and liquifying dead birds in a sort of disembodied cellophaned wasteland is made ever more discomforting by the sound of an ultrasound, a withering heartbeat. It is as though the pigeons are made to suffer the consequences that the city denies and the trauma unprocessed by its residents. “On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains—the dead bodies—of yesterday’s await the garbage truck. Nobody wants to have to think about them further. Nobody wonders where, each day, these bodies go.” A city which denies the confrontation of its own reality is critiqued by the very “waste” itself, the pigeons. In an interview with Supernova and Denver Digerati director, Ivar Zeile, the artist explains how pigeons, in many cities, are treated as though their hearts too do not beat, that they are without stories, simply refuse or vermin. Lee thus chooses the pigeons to narrate Body Keeps the Score. 

The work is a brilliant critique of our contemporary societies, who also choose to move forward too quickly from newsreel to newsreel. We shun the concept of sitting with our grief, collectively and individually, choosing instead to leave ourselves enveloped in unprocessed and never-ceasing trauma. The trauma, like the waste of Leona, can best be explained in Calvino’s words, as “the bulk of the outflow increases, and the piles rise higher, stratify, extend over a wider perimeter. Perhaps there is a whole world, beyond the city’s boundaries, covered by craters of dead bodies, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption.” What becomes of a society that does not examine its daily, weekly, or even decades, and centuries of repressed histories?