Supervision: Nicholas Thomas Lee
Royal Danish Academy, 2023
Corridor – negative model.
The negative model of the corridor emphasizes its geometry: narrow and devoid of natural light. The number of doorways casted in plaster represents duality and the unavailability of escape routes for victims. The media quotes and interview excerpts displayed on the walls serve as an allegory for the notion that harsh environments preserve and trigger PTSD.
Bed – material duality.
Altering the materiality of the safest furniture item in the domestic space was aimed at offering a different perspective on possessions for individuals who have experienced abuse. The bed, being a gender-role based object, represents the highest risk in instances of domestic violence.
Window – social construct.
Any connection with the outside world is critical in the context of domestic violence. Layers of privacy, in the form of closed windows and multiple lines of curtains, disconnect the victim from potential help through neighbors and passing strangers.
Based on series of interviews with victims and crisis center managers, the atlas illustrating that those who have experienced abuse perceive domestic spaces differently. Everyday household objects might trigger trauma and leave an imprint on victims, both physically and emotionally.
Domestic abuse, showed through the spatial analysis lens, reveals how the home has been mishandled to become a tool of violence. Although the act of abuse vary in typology and social class, the individual incidents are part of a wider pattern, and the underlying spatial principles remain consistent.
All affiliated entities and individuals have been classified into seven categories, each encompassing relevant stakeholders in Copenhagen, Denmark: counseling, crisis centers, theoretical research, law enforcement, victims, data/statistics, and artistic initiatives. The project methodology closely aligns with a heuristic approach employed in testing UI design, involving the iterative validation, augmentation, or negation of hypotheses through collaboration with stakeholders. Initial hypotheses, derived from theoretical frameworks, underwent confirmation or refutation during a series of interviews with the identified stakeholders.
In the Danish Penal Code section 237, homicide is defined as: ‘The person who kills another person is to be punished with imprisonment of between 5 years and life time.’ What is not mentioned in this legal text is the intent, and intent has to be proven in order to convict someone of homicide. There might be cases where the death of one person was not the result of an intended action, but as an unfortunate and unintended result of an action aiming at doing less harm than death.
This implies the difficulty in identifying instances of intimate partner violence through statistical measures.
Diana Maria Olsson – First Class Citizen
Jenna Gillinger – Home is Where Her Horror is
Søren Rye – Intimate Partner Homicide in Denmark 2007–2017:
Tracking Potential Predictors of Fatal ViolenceSofie
Henze-Pedersen, Juliane Birkedal Poulsen – Finding Home: The Experience of Home on Journeys Away from Intimate Partner Violence
D. Kelly Weisberg – Property Damage in the Domestic Violence Context
Røde Kors – Fra Bolig til Hjem