daniella ungo berrío
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RESEARCH


Paschōgraphia or How to Read Pain
Spring 2025

Final thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts degree in Visual and Critical Studies
[Full Text ]

Final presentation for 2025 Undergraduate Visual and Critical Studies Symposium: “Fine Young Cannibals”
[Transcript]

“This thesis is a looping gesture. A never-ending spiral. A question I ask again and again, in slightly altered forms, across the body and through time. It’s a study in failure—of language, of systems, of medicine—to contain what hurts. Or perhaps more precisely, it is an attempt to describe pain not as a symptom, but as a structure. As pattern. As code. It begins with the autoimmune body; a body that turns on itself, misreads its own signals, and produces noise instead of clarity. From here, I move through mathematical metaphors, computational science, and etymological study to ask how we narrate the chronic, the invisible, the non-linear. What does it mean to speak of illness in recursion? To fold experiences into themselves, to repeat in variation, to iterate? Drawing from Koine Greek, programming languages, and the poetics of data, in this project I resist the closure of diagnosis and the authority of clinical objectivity. Instead, I construct a scaffold of metaphors—brittle, pliable, interlinked—to reimagine autoimmune illness as a system of meaning-making. Not a problem to be solved, but a landscape to be mapped. A condition to be read.

This is not a cure. It is my invitation to read pain otherwise.”





Wounded Women

Spring 2024
Final presentation for class in Visual and Critical Studies department: Wandering Uterus

«I saw an angel close by me, on my left side, in bodily form. This I am not accustomed to see, unless very rarely. [...] I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. [...] The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.»


http://carstuckgirls.com/

Spring 2024
Mid-semester group lecture for class in Visual and Critical Studies department: Automatic for the People
Presented by: Daniella Ungo Berrío, Ahnali Tran, Lithe Ettawageshik, Lydia Burkett and Clara Neisel










The M(O)ther as Monster


Summer 2023

Final presentation for class in Art Therapy department: Psychoanalytic and Anthropological Perspectives on Art and Childhood











Holy Wounds



Winter 2023

Notes for  lecture at the Siena Art Institute for class: Living the Past in the Present The Art of Archive


















Body Horror and Posthumanism




Fall 2022

Final presentation for class in Art & Technology / Sound Practices department: Brave N3w_B0d13s














The Social Life of Social Death



Fall 2022
Final presentation for class in Social Sciences department: On Black Matters