PhD researcher Xsara Helmi will have her poem To Be Unmade featured in Issue #9 of Indelible, the literary and arts journal from the London Arts-Based Research Centre. The issue, themed Awakening, launches on 11th October in both print and digital formats.
The poem emerged as a reflexive, transdisciplinary, arts-based, and heuristic-inspired exploration, tracing the interconnections of body, land, memory, and emotion. Drawing on autistic, neurodivergent-led affect and eco-poetic attunement, Helmi integrates poetic writing into her practice to navigate conscious and unconscious processes, reflecting the felt experience of neurodivergent being in the world.
To Be Unmade engages with themes of threshold, surrender, and transformation, reflecting Jungian individuation, where disparate aspects of self, body, psyche, and environment move toward integration, and Carl Rogers’ concept of self-actualisation, in which the self unfolds, adapts, and reaches toward its fullest potential.
Helmi’s core funded work explores the numinous and how autistic listening and aural diversity can serve as a gateway to the divine and the sublime. Her broader transdisciplinary arts-based research explores how integrating neurodivergent positionality, affect, and embodied phenomenology deepens the creative generativity of arts-based practice- in alignment with a/r/tography.