An exploration of fragility and damage.
Video work
Conversations with a conservator about fragility and damage.
Originally commissioned by Wellcome Collection to respond to the question “What’s it like to access Wellcome Collection holdings on psychiatry as a person with lived experience of long-term mental distress?” this work ventroliquises a conservator talking about paper conservation in order to consider knotty questions of how people experiencing mental distress both perceive danger in vulnerability, and are perceived as dangerous by others.
Workshop (first held at Pushkin House)
We will explore the building as an organism. We will look carefully at elements of damage: cracks, tears, and weaknesses. We will listen to them. They will ventriloquise. We will pay attention to points of resonance and tension between our attitude to the delicacy in our environment, and in ourselves.
Using audio interviews about fragility and damage conducted with museum conservators as a starting point, we will spend some time exploring Pushkin House and its contents, examining what different forms of insight are offered to us by various frames and lenses (a camera, a microscope, a person).
This workshop will share and build on Rhiannon’s audio-centred making process for Monstrous Delicacy, a short film commissioned by the Wellcome Collection.