Disturbance – A Visual Display of Migraine Aura, Francesca Magliani

Disturbance is a research and the visual representation of the perceptions induced by migraine aura. The migraine aura consist in a series of symptoms – visual, sensory and linguistic symptoms – quite often characterized by hallucinations.

The author Francesca Magliani and do suffer from migraine. As a graphic designer, she have found easier to explain my problem trough images instead of words. For Disturbance she did not wanted to represent only my own migraine, but she wanted to make a tool, an object that could help to facilitate the communication between someone who has migraine and someone who does not. So she started talking with some specialists and with many people who suffer from migraine. Many of them told her that one of the most frustrating things was the struggle to try to explain by words, what only them could feel and see.

In order to show how the system works, she illustrated a series of “aura portraits”. These posters show the combination of different disturbances and represent the portraits of some of the people who told me their stories.

Her work is based mostly on the researches by Dr. Oliver Sacks, in particular on the book Migraine, from which are taken also some texts used in the project. Another fundamental text for the research has been Migraine Art, The Migraine Experience from Within by Klaus Podoll and Derek Robinson.