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Rehab Tower Clinic/Anorexia addiction treatments/in Akaland

I don’t know what happened in Akan’s mind, because one day, she woke up very strong and sure she had a rule to accomplish.

Probably it was her anorexia getting worse every day.

I didn’t dare to talk to her about that, as I thought, it was late in life, and I’ve understood she had become to believe she got a mission on earth.

One day she came to me and informed me: “There was no better place to begin an anorexia addiction treatment than in Akan’s Tower.”

With over 25 years of fighting anorexia on her own, Akan had found the strength to help others anorexic persons to recover from the challenges of addiction and other autistic disorders.

Akan’s tower provided an unparallelled range of services delivered by the “Tenants Team”, the passionate and complete team of Akan’s Friends.

Treatment offered at Akan’s Tower Clinic didn’t only address eating disorders but also Asperger Syndrom among others.

 

Whether you needed to seek addiction treatment for yourself or a loved one, you would find that Akan’s Team offered a peaceful setting that was solidarity oriented.

With its 4 floors dedicated to anorexia treatment, open 24/7, Akan’s Tower seemed to be the best immediate assistance.

Rehab Tower Clinic provided residential primary treatment, secondary care, detox, interventions, counselling and aftercare as well as a dedicated hurt and unfortunate persons and runaway rescue program.

Fact: there was no brochure for fees at Akan’s Tower clinic, as it was free for people in anorexic crisis.

Places were counted, of course, but with its 24 bedrooms and its 5 lounges, 5 kitchen, 24 bathrooms, Akan’s clinic offered a chance to get away from the distractions and triggers in every day life and allowed one to recuperate and focus on getting better.

First step was admission.

And in crisis situation anorexic persons needed immediate admission, as danger of death could be imminent.

The Rehab Tower Clinic opening ceremony took place on 14 of April 1991.

Akan had advertised in newspapers and talked on TV special disorders program.

That was it, she and her precious team were ready to welcome the deadliest and weakest anorexic person.

Only 24 places.

 

Museu Calouste Gulbenkian (LISBOA). (la file d’attente pour le casting devant Akan.

 

Akan and her special members (the Tenants team)  had voted to choose the worst figures which would be able to come for selection and discretely favor the most freakish anorexic cases.

It was not a question of social backgrounds; candidates would be chosen on anonymous basis.

Young girls and women were queuing along the main avenue in town center from airport to Akan’s tower and from train station to A. Tower.

Even lost runaway hurt anorexic street workers came from nowhere to find a bed and cuddles in Rehab Tower clinic.


“Akan distribuant ses points aux candidates du casting”.

 

And it made you sick to see dying starving girls collapsing on the pavement without help of anybody, as everybody was dying in this queue of ghosts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Museu Calouste Gulbenkian. (La queue pour le paradis)

 

Alice Odilon. 16 of  june 2011.

 

Anorexia saved my life and made sense to me

“Self-Portrait”: Spéculaire du cavalier de coeur. Alice Odilon 1984. All rights reserved.

 

Just a few words about the present: I’m still alive and out of the deep dark of my adolescence.

I found a way to be somebody, in being anorexic.

It doesn’t mean I’m safe, but, yes, I’m still enjoying my body, my thoughts, even if they’re disturbed, sick or suffering.

I know my Artwork would stay hidden in heavy boxes, and never discovered, screaming in silence, with acceptance and deliberated renouncement.

The game will be stronger if I loose and if I never see the light of success.

No money will never come, no handshake either, nothing, just a temporary place in some dusty cardboards under other cardboards.

Something is wrong with my Art, something is making it undercover, secret, ashamed and unbroken in the same time.

A touch of anorexic french woman fine art photography.

Nobody will know, nobody will know I wanted to tell about my anorexia and my desire to stay like that, because it’s worth it.

It makes sense to be in deny and blossom of bony body.

Without all this ritual of my anorexic behavior, I would have been nothing, nothing.

Through my eyes, I fight to keep going.

My anorexia is my comfort, my rescue, and gives me hope.

Alice ODILON. 2011 June.

 

The Doll “Isee” and the androgyn temptation of anorexia

Je crois que cela se passait en Hiver, en janvier, dans cette ville inconnue, où je vivais chaque nuit dans mes rêves acérés.

A quelques dizaine de mètres de la tour akanienne, un petit café parisien avait imposé ses tables et badots, parmi lesquels je reconnus aisément Flower Doll avec sa capeline de pétales blanches, le Ragdoll cat, jouant à Lolita derrière ses immenses lunettes noires, dissimulant le bleu trop bleu de ses yeux ronds.
Assise plus loin, j’identifiais sans hésitations, malgré ce nouveau béret tombant, blanc également, la petite Akan, soucieuse de la beauté de sa peau et qui barrait le soleil grâce à sa nouvelle coiffure immaculée.
Elle aussi portait de larges lunettes noires pour éviter l’assaut des rayons UV sur le contour de ses yeux immenses.
Syndra Raynaud, “La Main coupée” fumait une cigarette blonde vanillée, les doigts longs étirés langoureusement, appuyée contre le bras de la Petite Akan.

Elle semblait avoir oublié sa “propriétaire”, la poupée voleuse amputée par les milices Iranniennes.

Qui, elle, n’avait toujours pas montré le bout de son bras.

Betsy Mac Call, seule, manquait à ce rendez-vous en terrasse; tombée de fatigue, immergée dans une sieste platiforme au 32 étage de la tour, après avoir couru quelques 40 km la veille pour: “The anorexic paper doll Charity”.

- Mince alors! s’écria la poupée fleur (habituellement muette et aveugle) en regardant arriver cette créature indécise et délicieusement ciselée, de l’autre côté de l’Avenue A.

- Elle est nue, sa tête est nue. Si maigre et si belle! Ses seins sont presque inexistants, pointés comme des dunes de sable. Murmura un homme assis à côté d’une pin-up jalouse.

- Elle est si blanche, si longue, si tendue!

Enchérit une jeune femme laide, à la peau couperosée et aux cheveux bruns courts, assise à une table à côté.

- Quelle façon particulière de marcher! Quelle élégance gauche!

S’étourdit Syndra Raynaud, les doigts déployés vers le ciel.


“The Androgyn Doll “ISEE”. Alice Odilon 2011


- Regardez! Ses yeux glacés chavirent au delà d’elle-même, comme si l’orgasme sexuel venait de traverser son corps de poupée au sexe indéterminé.

Ajouta la main coupée, soudainement bleutée par une sorte d’excitation envahissante.

- Elle semble avoir faim, de loin, je vois sa faim, la négation de sa faim en elle, pour être belle, indépendante, et insoumise. S’écria le Ragdoll cat, assis à côté de Flower doll.

- Elle semble vouloir échapper à son ombre.

- Quelle drôle d’inquiétude se lit sur son visage!

- Oui, elle semble terrifiée par quelque chose qui ne se voit pas, qui ne se dit pas! ajouta Akan aux aguets.

- Ces yeux transparents, c’est terriblement troublant! ronronna le chat!

- Un tel désarroi dans ce regard de verre, une telle déception! quelle pauvre poupée! s’écria le garçon de café, pâle de fatigue.

La créature incertaine avançait d’un pas silencieux et cassé comme celui d’un pantin.

La rigidité de ses membres empêchait un mouvement délié et entraînait des rythmes saccadés, surprenants, inquiétants et en même temps extrêmement séduisants.

Plus personne ne pouvait quitter des yeux cette poupée raidie et anéantie par l’absence de toute identité.

Il était plaisant de voir qu’elle n’appartenait ni au genre masculin, par son port de tête et la finesse de sa peau marbrée de froid, par la longueur de ses cils noirs caressant la lumière de la nuit, ni au genre féminin par ses allures adolescentes de jeune garçon insurgé.

Akan l’imagina, déchet de plaisir, prostituée, transsexuelle empêchée, esclave dieu offert aux violences et déjection d’une communauté grasse de pouvoir et de mensonges.

De son corps, on aurait dit celui d’un Apollon amaigri par la soif d’être une femme.

Cette allure terriblement enfantine et prostituée de poupée égarée, disparaissait parfois dans la lumière, si l’on considérait ses bras et l’angulation aiguë de ses jambes.

Rien d’une femme, tout d’un jeune homme et en même temps ni l’un ni l’autre! Une jeune femme maigre au sexe nu, à vendre!

Une tatouée, une brûlée par les cigarettes, un androgyne épilé pour la scène et la jouissance des illuminatis.

(L’objet des désirs enfouis chez ces Messieurs de pouvoir, masquant leur indomptables pulsions homosexuelle et prédatrice.)

- Un ange castré aux allures de fée perdue, sale, et wagabonde.

Virilité et vulnérabilité épousaient les forces saillantes de sa peau à fleur d’os.

Sa maigreur n’était plus, son squelette était tout, ses allures habillaient la chair disparue.

En même temps, ce manque de tout, inspirait une sauvage sexualité à tout ceux qui la regardait: un fantasme de viol, d’attaches, de claques et de possession terminale sur ce corps dénué de possession.

Elle semblait si embarassée de vivre son personnage, cette carcasse aristocratique.

Aveuglée par la peur, elle se sentit brutalement dévisagée par ces gens regroupés aux terrasses.

Elle lança  un regard de verre, opalescent et vif, cruel et tendre à la fois.

Comme pour dire: “je veux disparaître mais je veux subir votre désir criminel de me violer.”

Son être si incandescent se réfugiait dans des yeux admirables, impossiblement beaux, et son squelette érectile, qui finirait par tomber en cendre.

Akan eut très envie de l’inviter à s’assoir parmi ses amis.

Mais était-il humain de demander à quelqu’un de si affamé de se joindre à ceux qui vivent?

Alice Odilon. 21 of January 2011

Isabelle Caro’s soul welcomed in Akan’s Building

In the building, many flats were still available to rent, and it’s not a good thing to leave rooms unoccupied for a long time, as you know, intrusive rats are always looking around to invade warm vacant spaces.
That’s what Akan was worried about and determined to erase the invaders, in her special anorexic area.
When Akan and her friends were told about Isabelle Caro’s death in November 2010, they decided to allocate an apartment to her, even if her body was definitively gone.


“The Empty Flat of Isabelle Caro”. Copyright Alice Odilon 2011


“Isabelle Caro.”Photo Olivero Toscany.

It sounds certainly like a sanctuary, but this flat wouldn’t be opened to the public and would stay empty and full of soul as long as the building existed.
Every day, somebody from the building would come to clean the flat and check the efficiency of the rodent traps and repellents.
It was an obsession for Akan; she suffered from a musophobia since childhood and was unable to deal with it, being tired of tiptoeing around her fears.
Then she realized her terrible anxiety was directly linked with her own anorexia, and influenced a huge part of her excessive self-control behaviour.
Every strong intrusive element, like food, skin contact, eye contact, aggressive interlocution, virile interpellation, was felt like a threat.
This included rats, intrusive, hidden, clever and tough, permanently threatening to appear, to come, to attack.

Rats were unpredictable, and, even hidden, they were present.

Akan felt their omnipresence.
But in a sort of  indecent blind inconsistency, Akan had finally accepted that rats exist and that they might shoot up suddenly in front of her, or behind her.
This means that Akan had dared to live, to deal with her morbid anorexia, she had accepted the violation of food in her body, she had accepted to feed herself.
Still the ghost of rats remained, as an eternal symbol of extreme menace, alarm telling her: “Remember we’re here and you’ll die”.
From now on Akan was able to deal with food, as she got an adequate amount every day, enough to run every day 15km,  but on the other hand, she stayed very weak, concerning relationships with strangers, especially noisy virile persons.
It was possible for Akan to feel Isabelle Caro’s deep suffering, continuously haunted by her hunger, by her needing body,  and this terror to be feed by force in hospital.


“Isabelle Caro”. Google Images.

Anyway, Isabelle Caro sparkled in the sky as a border-line movie star and had been so representative of X bodily metaphor of anorexia, that Akan wanted to
preserve the peace of her embodied soul in this unfurnished white apartment on the 11th floor.

The apartment n° AX 28.

Clever brilliant Isabelle Caro had targeted the Zero incarnation all her life, the X bodily metaphor of anorexia, looking permanently for an embodied soul in a minimal body.
The divine tight face of Isabelle with these jewel-like turquoise bright eyes, erected in the dark blue sky.
Her sad mouth, her tiny nose, her fragile hair were going to dry in the labyrinth of death.
But her eyes would stay everywhere in this flat, in the elevators of the building, in the parking, in the steps, like CCTV.
She had flirted with the risky possibility of existing in a nearly dead body and had rigidly wielded her piercing hypnotic regard every second of her life, to stay alive without food and peace.
This physical envelop in which she had been decked out during the martyrdom of her life, has failed and claimed mercy for an infinite wild abandon.
So for now, the Flat AX28, got a name on the door: Isabelle Caro.
Such a strong silence on the 11th floor, such a bright glimmer coming from inside this place, to light the way of lost anorexic people in the street going nowhere, rejecting rescue, or running away from jail and medical assistance.
Because anorexia is much more than a physical symptom.
Anorexia is asking us to modify the codes of our language.
Something is wrong with our communication, something escapes, unnoticed, sadly ignored by stereotypical understanding.
The place would be staying “empty” to serve the “non-dit” of Isabelle Caro.

Alice Odilon. 10/01/2011

One of the most searing Portraits of doll’s desperation ever put in Akan’s story.

It’s time to tell about essential, minimal, brutal things in Life. Isn’t it?

Akan had tried terribly hard to postpone this moment when a dark whispering murmur of the wind would came.

But it happened despite that.
This wind was the announcement of death.
Somebody in the tower was going to leave tragically.
This doll didn’t deserve to die alone nor endure this hard life.
This black day was actually a relief for this tenant, a squatter in fact.

She had been hiding in a basement for a few days after having run away from Bresson-City.

Her name was Doll “Mouchette”.


She came from the county of Bernanoshire, where she had lived in hardship in Bresson-city.
There she had faced major difficulties: a dying mother, an alcoholic father who was absent, and a baby brother in need of care.


She had been subjected to derision from her teachers.

“Nothing but a little savage” was how the Bresson-city school-teacher had described fourteen-year-old Mouchette, and that view had been echoed by every right-thinking local citizen.
Mouchette had been alone, completely alone, against everyone.”



Her mother was too sick to get out of bed,  Mouchette had been forced to take on the motherly tasks, preparing everyone’s meals and feeding her younger sibling.

At one point, it even looked like she might try breastfeeding when there was no fire on the stove to heat the baby’s milk.



She had been forced to be an adult even before her body was capable.
Also one dark night she had been raped by a bad man in a wood.


As tragedies continued to pile up, she had decided to leave Bresson-city and to take her life into her own hands, like a last act of defiance.
Mouchette doll was the most beautiful of dolls despite her tangled black hair, her dirty nails, and her wooden clogs.
Akan didn’t know Mouchette, until she had gone to bathe in the river with her friend Betsy, anorexic paper-doll and the severed hand of the doll who had disappeared.
It was the spring of 2011 in April.
It was still very chilly and the wind was twisting and twirling the petals of the young trees in bloom.
This supremely delicate dance had attracted a sad person.


“Mouchette finds rescue and peace in the nature”.

A young doll soiled by the earth and misery, with black hair matted and covered with dust, was sitting, stretched out on the ground, on the green bank: Mouchette.

Betsy who was unable to swim, given that her paper body would disintegrate, was also seated on the other side of the river, looking after the towels of her friends, Akan and Syndra Raynaud.

Akan and Syndra were playing in the cool water splashing each other and diving into the depths.
Their bodies glided in the light, with the thinness of Akan’s body magnificent in the light of the ripples, her skin both pale and livid embellishing the river.
Syndra, the severed hand of the doll who had disappeared, with her long fingers, mimicked the touching grace of a starfish.
Syndra became a mischievous mermaid jumping in the silvery waters; her fingers did not feel the slightest cold or the slightest increase in temperature: a kind of provisional harmony!


Suddenly a cry, Betsy, panicked, helpless, witness of the worst, the death of Mouchette.


Mouchette had let herself roll from the top of the bank like a lifeless puppet carried away by her own momentum down the slope.

{Of course, she does it alone, so maybe Bresson isn’t letting us off the hook after all.

Maybe putting up with a hard life leads us to even harder, more isolated positions.

In the prologue, Mouchette’s mother refers to a stone that is inside her, a metaphor for her illness.

But then, it could be where we all end up, weighted down, and the more we struggle, like a bird ensnared in a poacher’s trap, the more it hurts.

Bresson only releases Mouchette by letting that full weight land on her, and thus pushing her under.}

Mouchette let herself slide into the cold water, drown in icy water, on this beautiful sunny morning in mid-April.

Akan and Syndra had seen nothing, but felt the tumult of the circles in the water left by the despairing leap of the Doll Mouchette.


Betsy stiff with pain, dried out with sadness, stiffened even more before the now empty water.

It was April 14, 2011, Doll Mouchette would leave an enormous hole in the lives of Akan and her friends.

Bresson, director of the masterpiece, says:

“Mouchette offers evidence of misery and cruelty.

She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations.”



For Mouchette. Alice Odilon December 2010.

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