La∙cu∙na

A variety of professions use the word lacuna. It is widely used in art restoration, medicine, law; it simply means an empty space, cavity or gap. In 2022, I read about it in trauma recovery for the first time:

“…The traumatic lacuna is not silent. It has black-hole like qualities: it engulfs, it ensnarls, in its emptiness it is a sounding box for infernal voices. One might listen to this lacuna as one listens to the sounds coming from a seashell. Like the shell, the lacuna is a space saturated by the traces of what is not there; it is the ultimate signifier of the encounter between the moment of missing the actual scream and the resonance that will forever range beyond it.”— Dana Amir

This panel is an homage to early preverbal trauma and the inconceivable gap and rupture it leaves in human development.