A conversation between a therapist and their client unfolds as a yellow ball swings back and forth. Replicating simple animations of online EMDR videos used to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Consensual Healing feeds Octavia Butler’s short story ‘Bloodchild’ through scripted therapeutic protocols, destabilising relations between coercion and consent, form and content, trauma and fiction.

Facilitator: Ok, I hear you. Let’s start over again.

Client: I’m having trouble remembering to be honest. Every time I try, I just see nothing, no image, but I remember how it felt.

Facilitator: Ok, well, can you tell me?

Client: Sure. I just remember feeling confused. I felt deeply loved and deeply mistreated at the same time.

Facilitator: Ok. Why do think you felt that way.

Client: Something changed in me. I was trying to navigate two different ways of seeing the world. It was a moment of transition.

Facilitator: Even if you can’t remember the whole story, tell me the details you remember.

Music by Juliana Huxtable; sound by Marco Gomez