TRAUM(a)

TRAUM(a) begins with a broken word.
In German, Traum means dream. Trauma is a wound. One letter separates imagination from flesh. The project exists in this gap: when a dream turns into body.

It was not the first time a scalpel crossed my skin. It was the first time I chose it. After years of therapy, fear, and waiting, I made the most important decision of my life. I faced not only physical pain, but a society that continues to refuse non-binary visibility.

My body is resistant matter and I feel like a piece of marble: the form already exists beneath the surface. It pushes outward, insists, claims space. Before flesh, I am form. A form demanding emergence.

April 23, 2025 marks my second birth.

I am Captain John, a non-binary photographer living in Berlin for 15 years. Physical change is only the visible threshold. The real passage happens in the gaze, where a body is inhabited and it is read.

Photography accompanies this process. Through diary practice and phototherapy, the act of photographing interrupts pain and makes it observable. A survival gesture.

TRAUM(a) is an archive of permanent transition, a departure from the colonialism of the body that demands coherence and opposition, a space where no one exists.