USETE FRAGMENTER
(Unseen Fragments)
(Unseen Fragments)
2023 · Semi-permanent installation · MIND Museum, Middelfart
Usete Fragmenter brings historical photographs of patients and staff into the spaces of the former psychiatric hospital in Middelfart.
Through installations in the museum garden and screen-based works inside the building, the project creates encounters between present-day visitors and traces of the people who once lived and worked there. It explores the relationship between photographic memory, individual presence and institutional history.
In the Museum garden, clusters of mirrored panels bring together three kinds of historical fragment: an image of an artefact from the hospital’s past, a photograph of former patients, and words written by a former patient or member of staff. Drawn from Middelfart Museum’s collection, the materials are assembled across different lives and moments in history. Their juxtaposition opens relationships between personal experience, institutional history and the objects through which that history survives.
The mirrored surfaces bring the surrounding garden and present-day visitors into these encounters. People separated by time briefly occupy a shared visual space, connecting the lives recorded in the archive with the world continuing around them.
Inside the museum, historical photographs dissolve into fractal patterns and materialise from them again. Faces and bodies move between recognisable presence and abstraction. This movement approaches memory as something that emerges, fragments and takes form again, suggesting the passage of people into and out of the lived world.
The following fragment by former patient Sofie Skotte is included in one of the garden installations:
“Til en realistisk Fremstilling af ‘Forholdene’ derinde, forslaar det almindelige danske Sprog ikke. Ja, jeg vover at paastaa, at ikke engang den ny, særdeles udmærkede Ide med Fotografering af Patienterne forslaar. Man kan ikke se Vedkommendes Rædsel, hans grænseløse Angst for aldrig at slippe ud, for at blive sløv eller sindssyg. Alligevel betegner denne Fotografering dog et Fremskridt i Humanitet.”
“For a realistic account of the ‘conditions’ in there, ordinary Danish is insufficient. Indeed, I venture to claim that even the new, most excellent idea of photographing patients is insufficient. You cannot see the person’s terror, their boundless fear of never getting out, of becoming dulled or losing their mind. Nevertheless, this photography does represent a step towards greater humanity.”
— Sofie Skotte, Glimt af Livet i en dansk Sindssygeanstalt anno 1908
English translation from the Danish
English translation from the Danish