The Uncovery

The Uncovery is a hybrid, auto-speculative archive that blends personal narrative, disability history, and AI-driven media into an immersive landscape of recovery and memory. The project transforms 20 years of journals, medical records, video diaries, road-trip footage, and photographic archives into a living, nonlinear storyworld. Through portals, nodes, and spatial metaphors, The Uncovery explores how trauma, neurodivergence, and imagination shape identity—and how accessible creative technologies can support self-emancipation.

The prototype for the exhibition includes: a map of “Uncovery Land,” a 3D virtual space representing the ranch where I was saved after my car accident, layered video of my road travels, and audio narration about opening my medical archive after 15 years. The work uses collage, AI models, and psychogeographic movement to create a palimpsest of lived and speculative experience.

Transcript

The Uncovery: Opening the Box

Tanya V: I’ve been carrying this box for twenty years.

Part of it is cardboard and tape. Part of it is memory and grief. It holds writing from the girl I was, medical paperwork from the woman I was becoming, and fragments of all the selves I had to leave behind just to stay alive.

For years, I couldn’t even touch it.

Every page inside felt like a live wire connected to trauma, to sensory overload, to moments when I was undiagnosed and trying to survive in a world built for people who process differently. My neurodivergence, my sensory challenges, my cognitive fatigue—none of that had language back then. I just knew something was breaking down, and nobody could see it.

So the box stayed closed.

And I stayed busy pretending I didn’t need it.

But healing has its own timing—slow, nonlinear, neurodivergent timing.

A kind of pacing that isn’t about productivity but about permission.

When I finally opened the box, it felt like opening a portal.

There were medical files, trauma, debris, and also glimmers of imagination—video fragments, poems, scraps of stories. And there was a throughline I had never seen before: a girl who refused to give up.

Archiving this history is not easy. It’s arduous and intimate. It pulls at my nervous system. It pushes against my executive functioning. It asks me to confront versions of myself I’ve avoided for decades.

But it also reminds me why I do this work.

My art practice has always been an uncovering—of what’s been discarded, overlooked, or misunderstood. I work through improvisation and found materials; I compost what no longer serves. My disability isn’t a footnote; it is the lens through which I create, pace, and make meaning.

And The Uncovery—this project—is my attempt to transform all of this into a map.

Not a tidy one. A lived one.

A speculative one.

I’m documenting my creative recovery, using video journals, writing, generative tools, and poetic inquiry to make sense of what happened to me—and to offer something to others who are living inside their own impossible boxes.

Because I’m not just archiving a life.

I’m building a framework.

A way of working that’s access-centered, trauma-informed, spacious, and flexible.

A way that honors nonlinear processing, sensory realities, and the slow, spiraled pathways that neurodivergent people often walk.

I’m doing this for the person I used to be—who needed a model, a map, a voice.

And I’m doing it for anyone who’s ever felt buried under paperwork, diagnoses, shame, or stories they didn’t yet have words for.

Opening this box is painful.

But it’s also liberating.

And if my process—messy, slow, improvisational—can help someone else see themselves with more compassion, or help them build their own archive of becoming, then every hour I spend inside this excavation is worth it.

Because healing is generative.

Access is creative.

And the stories we reclaim become the worlds we build next.

The following media is presented as a YouTube player embedded in Able Player.