Year
2021
Tag
Installations
At the end of the exhibition, a bed waited beneath two lamps. Pillows, bedside tables and a rug gave the arrangement the familiarity of a room prepared for rest. Across the blanket, repeated human silhouettes formed a pattern. Along its edge, a sentence referred to people being evicted from their homes.
Violence by Omission placed the security of a bed beside the loss of that security. The visitor encountered the subject through a domestic object that could still be approached, touched and occupied. Comfort remained available while the blanket made another person’s displacement present.
Sculptural installation · 730 Hours of Violence · Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona.
Installation documentation · 2021 · Silent excerpt from the exhibition camera archive.
A number close to the skin
The blanket carried the figure of 540 people used in the exhibition’s account of monthly displacement in Barcelona. The original project materials differ in describing this figure as people or evictions; it should therefore be understood as the number represented by the artwork, rather than a verified monthly measure.
The repeated silhouettes brought counting into a space associated with an individual body. A blanket ordinarily holds warmth close and separates the sleeper from the room. Here, the same surface also carried information from beyond it. The work’s tension depended on that coexistence: a person could recognise the message and still accept the invitation to rest.
The position of the witness
Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others offers a way to think alongside this encounter. Her writing examines the uncertain relationship between seeing suffering, feeling sympathy and understanding what response might follow. Looking does not have one inevitable moral result.
The bed gave the visitor a particular position from which to consider that uncertainty. Knowledge of another person’s insecurity entered a setting in which one’s own comfort could remain undisturbed. This did not make every act of resting equivalent to a refusal of responsibility. It exposed how easily awareness and ordinary life can continue beside one another.
Leaving the room
By closing 730 Hours of Violence with a domestic scene, we returned the exhibition’s public questions to a familiar scale. Earlier works concerned platforms, algorithms, urban design and social expectations. The final encounter concerned the person who had been looking at them, and the limits of what looking alone could accomplish.
The installation supplied no action whose completion could settle that question. Its bed remained inviting, and the figures remained on the blanket. The visitor eventually had to leave a scene in which the availability of rest and the distribution of safety had briefly occupied the same place.
An ordinary room, an unsettling blanket
A tailor-made patterned blanket lay over a double bed with a mattress, pillows and linen. Bedside tables, lighting, a radio and a rug completed the domestic scene. The arrangement gave the figure on the blanket a familiar setting, making the relationship between comfort and displacement difficult to keep at a distance.
Assembly study · An explanatory reconstruction from the exhibition archive. Components are separated for clarity; proportions are illustrative.
Materials & components
- Custom patterned blanket
- Double bed, mattress, pillows and linen
- Bedside tables, lighting and radio
- Rug
Part of 730 Hours of Violence, an exhibition by Domestic Data Streamers at Mutuo Gallery, Barcelona, 7–30 September 2021.
This project received funding through the MediaFutures project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 951962. The work reflects the authors’ views; the European Commission is not responsible for any use of the information.
