180 degrees of trauma exploits moments of violence and rupture in order to investigate notions of vandalism, trauma and the three-dimensional manifestation of extreme occupation.
The work appropriates unexpected apertures found within the derelict army hospital, Detmold. In the same way as the opening in Carlo Crivelli’s painting Annunciation with St Emiduis (1486) makes sense only when the ray of light passes through it, this project attempts to make sense of other (more prosaic) ruptures and voids — acts of vandalism, holes and cuts in the building fabric.
Three adjacent rooms were linked by the installation, which deployed nylon thread to create a near-invisible spatial map of the violence meted out to the hospital. Constructed using 360 needles as anchor points (180 per aperture) and approximately 1.9km of thread, the installation was envisaged as an amplification of the narratives bound up within the relationships between space and the memory of trauma.
Estranged Space
Dr Mathew Emmett & David Littlefield.
Special thanks to: Joachim Antener, Mustafa Sahin and Manuela Lolato.