The Crisis Tapes

Charlie Simokaitis’ The Crisis Tapes is an account of when his daughter gradually lost her ability to see over the course of two years and experienced a powerful psychological response to her imminent, presumably diminished, reality. Depression and circular episodes of deep mental un-wellness have pervaded her subsequent life, and, reverberantly, that of his family, like a reoccurring grieving process. As parents seeking a pathway forward, they found themselves navigating a bureaucratic network of mazes, with duplicitous functionaries acting as their guides in a hall of mirrors. Over time, they found they had assumed the role of subjective interpreters of her once visible world, the descriptions of their surroundings, objects and phenomena becoming manifestly more exacting and streamlined. While their daughter, retreating from life, sought refuge in a forest of her own making, Simokaitis drew from the emotionally heightened disorientation, rage and confusion of their everyday life - a life, for his daughter, that was growing narrower by degrees, in which the act of seeing itself was being thoroughly considered.