Rachelle Foucachon

Becoming Unmade

MA Project 2021-2022

This project traces the struggle toward true self-knowledge and identity, without mask or pretense. Drawing on metaphorical themes inspired by Till We Have Faces, it explores the subconscious veiling of the self as an act of self-protection. Though one attempts to hide beneath this constructed identity, buried remnants of the self reemerge as a looming, intrusive presence, creating a sense of inner disjunction and duality. As increasingly desperate efforts are made to strengthen the outer persona and to quiet cognitive dissonance, a growing self-deception — seemingly innocuous at first — takes hold, gradually eroding deeper layers of personhood.

Recognizing and confronting what lies at the center of one’s soul requires a stripping away of illusions, a descent into one’s own shadows, an act of unearthing. Only through losing oneself and being unmade can a true identity begin to form.

All text excerpts below reproduced with permission from Till We Have Faces © copyright CS Lewis Pte Ltd 1956, for 2022 MA graduation show, University of Europe for Applied Sciences, Berlin.

As well as I could, I locked a door in my mind.

I saw that for years my life had been lived in two halves, never fitted together. […]

This was only the first stroke, a light one; the first snowflake of the winter I was entering, regarded only because it tells us what’s to come.

My aim was to build up more and more that strength, hard and joyless.

Nearly all that I called myself went with it. It was as if my whole soul had been one tooth and now that tooth was drawn. I was a gap.

All day, and often all night too, [I was] dragging up terrors, humiliations, struggles, and anguish that I had not thought of for years, letting Orual wake and speak, digging her almost out of a grave, out of the walled well.

Everything has to be begun over again.

“Die before you die. There is no chance after.”

The air was growing brighter and brighter about us; as if something had set it on fire… I was pierced through and through with the arrows of it. I was being unmade. I was no one.