Breathe Out (2022)
Ileana PascalauFrom the age of 15 years
Language: English
Duration: varying
Prior knowledge necessary ×
Subtitle ×
Translation into German ×
Barrier-free wc ✓
Childcare ×
Space for wheelchair ✓
Translation into sign language ×
Plenty of tackles, metallic bolts, ght leather-straps of close- ng corsets … were part of a prolific medical industry meant to „discipline“ and „correct“ the female body until well into the 20th century. Such medical concerns, nourished continuously by social anxieties and gender-related prejudices, aimed beyond bodily diseases towards „hygienics”of the mind. Thus, many scientific devices intended to relieve the body and mind in fact had the opposite effect, enhancing trauma and sexual inhibiton.
My installation points out this dark chapter in the history of the body, in which the notion of care is twinned with the shadow of harm. The term orthopaedics, from the Ancient Greek words orthós („straight, proper”) and paideía (“upbringing, training”) is confronted here with the concept of queer-paedics. In their materiality and shape, floating between the sculptural and the bidimensional, the objects composing Breathe Out have lost their anatomical function in order to become images, serving as a reminder that caring to acknowledge history is an essential component of the present knowledge of care.