It is a meticulous recording of actions and gestures of how these patients are cared for.
This is what we did: from each of the various care procedures, we created a visual arrangement of more or less controversial practices that we intertwined to create a configuration. For some this was an artistic installation. For us this was a method for displaying the syndrome that textbooks call ‘vegetative state’ as a dynamic configuration. We were not trying to depict ‘bad care’. We were not seeking to criticize the scientific disciplines or professionals from the outside. Instead we were trying to sensitize people to the relationships between practices and meanings, and show how the latter might change with the frame of reference. One could categorize our endeavor as something like a visual ethnography. This did not simply rely on text, photographs or video. It also used painting and techniques of montage to visually juxtapose, articulate, and relate practices that are usually difficult to take in at a single glance.
The exhibtion project in Karlsruhe was sponsored by the ZKM & the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture.
