Shared Inc. operated by xperiment!
© photos Shared Inc. & Florian Kloss & G. Ramsebner
„moving a body", visual ethnography, 2004
We showed this installation in various exhibitions. Often we found that it provoked debates about ‘big’ ethical questions, rather than discussions about the complex and mundane relations of sometimes cumbersome care procedures. It seemed as if the syndrome and the taken-for-granted moral dimensions of the topic attracted more interest than the ‘praxiography’ itself.
You will probably know the big questions: they centre around our
conceptualizations of life, and whether it is worthwhile living in a ‘vegetative’ state (coma vigil). Bereft of perception, intelligence, reason and the capacity for voluntary movement, such patients are only capable of visceral functions: digestion, circulation, body temperature, breathing. Does it make sense to keep them alive and at what cost? Are there remnants of consciousness, or the soul? Do patients feel pain? Will they wake up in the end, or inevitably remain in a coma for the rest of their lives? And, of course, there is the question as to whether ‘we’ should withdraw nutrition and let ‘them’ die?
Please keep in mind that we are talking of severely disabled people with a heterogeneous clinical picture. Even experts do not know how to categorize them ‘properly’. So there are no clear-cut answers to any of these questions. Rather, there are issues to do with quality, with the level of cumbersome care, and case management. And this is what we were trying to visualize for the public. So we were caught in wild oscillations between different reductionist, holistic, philosophical and spiritual arguments. Yet this wasn’t just how audiences far removed from concrete experience of the syndrome reacted. It also showed up in our own reasoning and, interestingly, among staff and family members (an additional group of experts) when they visited our installation.
Mexikokirche, Vienna, 2006
ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2005
46. Oktobarski Salon, Belgrade, 2005
