David Roman
Dyscrasia
In ancient medicine, “dyscrasia” was a term used to describe an imbalance of the four humours of the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. Nowadays, while four humours theory has been thoroughly debunked by modern science, its legacy remains as new systems of human categorization reappropriate its characteristics under new, modernity-sanctioned frameworks. By reappropriating this archaic theory, combining it with other taxonomies (like the four classical elements and the phases of the moon), and amplifying their symbolic characteristics, this work hopes to lampoon the obsession that humanity has with such methods of categorization while also capturing the fundamentally cyclical, violent, and ridiculous nature of human class society.
