MALLORY  SHOTWELL

Intake is a participatory performance that stages a bureaucratic care encounter shaped by the procedural logics of contemporary medicine. Participants complete a digital pre-appointment intake, enter a timed one-on-one appointment, and move through a structured sequence of disclosure, interpretation, documentation, and discharge. Their responses are processed into administrative record, formally archived, and concluded with the receipt of a prescription artifact. The encounter is familiar by design.

 

The work begins from the recognition that chronic illness is not experienced solely through symptoms, but through the systems those symptoms produce. Prolonged illness demands repeated acts of interpretation, self-monitoring, behavioral adaptation, emotional regulation, narrative compression, and institutional translation. By the time one enters a clinical encounter, substantial labor has already occurred. The patient arrives not simply as a body in distress, but as an administrator of that distress.

Intake takes this condition as both subject and structure.

​

The piece is particularly concerned with the forms of selfhood chronic illness produces under institutional conditions. Medical systems require coherence. Subjective and unstable bodily experience must be translated into recognizable categories, numerical scales, functional limitations, timelines, descriptors, and actionable narratives in order to become administratively legible. This process is not neutral. It shapes what counts as evidence, what becomes credible, and what remains difficult to articulate within systems built around efficiency, interpretation, and procedural continuity.

​

At the same time, Intake is not solely a critique of medicine’s bureaucratic architecture. The work also attends to the broader lived condition of chronic illness: altered temporality, fragmented function, dependency negotiation, embodied expertise, testimonial instability, and the repetitive labor of maintenance itself. The clinical encounter becomes one site in which these larger structures are condensed and made visible.

​

Situated between participatory performance, institutional critique, and social practice, Intake stages an encounter in which care, administration, and performance become difficult to separate. What emerges is not a simulation of medicine, but a closer examination of the mechanisms through which illness is interpreted, managed, and made socially intelligible.