Leonora Hamill, ROUFFACH

Room 13

In my works I focus on the affective dimension that lies in empathy, so as to respond with an appropriate emotionality to the thoughts and feelings of another person.
Rouffach is a video installation commissioned by the Centre Hospitalier de Rouffach, a mental hospital in Alsace, France. The commission made it possible for me to experience the encounter with other human beings through the use of the camera.
My starting point was Martin Schongauer’s 15th century altar of Our Lady of the Roses. I worked with seven patients because the prayer to the Virgin Mary is based on seven sorrows and seven joys. A simple binary structure emerged from this work – ask each person what their best and worst moments were.
Each patient was filmed frontally in the study, while answering these two questions, and then also filmed in different places geographically connected with the hospital – on the hospital floor, on the streets of the nearby town of Rouffach, in the vineyards surrounding the hospital, in the cloister of Colmar, in the forests around, near a lake, and on the top of the nearest mountain. The person is always moving away from the viewer, as if crossing the frame. The images of these people talking, listening and walking in space are juxtaposed in a triple projection channel.
Leonora Hamill

There is the opening up of a “new” dialectic within each character, who in recalling their own experiences to themselves, even before the spectator, generates a sort of short-circuit between what is said and what is unspeakable.
The result is an exchange of roles in which the patient, who is used to being assisted, takes the place of the healer (medical staff) for once, and the spectator becomes an accomplice in this mechanism. It is he who leads us into the meanders of the joy/pain experience, he who opens the doors of the empathic and psychic sphere.
“I won’t be able to see these patients with the same eyes as before…” was the comment of a nurse who had only just realised the inversion between the parties.Our perception almost stops in front of the dimension of the unspeakable and imposes deep reflections on the limit imposed on us by the words we have never had the courage to pronounce, and on the right to be heard, what in Rouffach’s reality is simply called le droit d’ècouter.
Edoardo Testori

Leonora Hamill was born in Parigi in 1978. She lives between Milan and London.