Soma is a hand painted hospital gown textile art exhibition piece conceived as a unique work where language and body become inseparable. Across the fabric, a single word is written by hand hundreds of times, transforming the hospital garment into a conceptual and physical gesture.
The word itself carries unusual richness. Its multilingual root branches into meanings connected to the chromosome, the ribosome and the lysosome — structures the body creates silently, without our awareness or control.
In ancient Greek, soma means body: the physical and tangible body that occupies space. As a result, the word travels across languages, disciplines and centuries while retaining its connection to human existence.
Within biology, soma designates all the non-reproductive cells of an organism. In other words, it refers to the functional body, the one that works and, eventually, the one that stops.
Meanwhile, in neuroscience the soma is the nucleus of the neuron, the centre from which information is processed. In pharmacology, however, the same term refers to a muscle relaxant.
In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, soma becomes the drug of social control — the pill that suppresses discomfort and transforms experience into obedience.
By contrast, in the Rigveda, soma appears as a sacred ritual drink offered both to the body and to the gods.
Hand painted hospital gown textile art exhibition
This layered semantic field forms the core of the artwork. Through a single repeated word, the body is named from the perspectives of biology, philosophy, literature and the sacred.
However, repetition here is not decorative. Inside the hospital, the body gradually loses its name, history and clothing. Instead, it becomes a patient, a case or a bed number.
For that reason, writing soma repeatedly by hand becomes a somatised and insistent act that returns to the body its oldest and perhaps most precise word.
Moreover, the manual writing on fabric is intentionally slow and physical. Each written soma is also a lived soma, marked directly onto the textile surface.
Soma belongs to the Hospital Series by Malimbus Studio, a body of conceptual textile artworks created from intervened hospital garments. Through these pieces, the series explores the body, health and the institutions that regulate and manage them.
SOMA is a hand painted hospital gown textile art exhibition piece and part of the Hospital Series by Malimbus Studio.
