created from interviews with the staff and patients at Building No. 19, Karl Gustav Carus University Hospital Clinic, Dresden, 2012
People, who come to the hospital as patients, will be worried by various thoughts and feelings. However, the staff and employees who work in this building in the medical, nursing and scientific fields, or who contribute to the function of the operations of the building through other services, find themselves in actual, everyday situations. They are engaged in routine things and pursue their own thoughts.
Sometimes it seems as if the two worlds – that of the patients and that of the employees – do not have a lot to do with one another. The text installation in the stairwell and in the entrance area to the lecture hall is intended to be a real and an imaginary place where both worlds overlap; a place in which the many different viewpoints speak for themselves and allow themselves to touch us. This word or that will catch one’s eye in passing, and may perhaps make a connection to the viewer’s current situation. The people who pass through these spaces are not only actors in their daily routines, but each of them has their own life story. In such a way, an isolated appearing word can trigger this or that association, or can find this or that echo inside a viewer. However, it refers to the real experiences and everyday reality of the other people in the clinic at the same time: In a soft voice, it is a reminder that the next thing that somebody does at this place will affect the actions and feelings of other people in various ways.
Judith Siegmund created the text installation from fragments of interviews following a period when Building No. 19 was renovated. She conducted interviews with future employees of the building, as well as conversations with patients about their daily lives in the hospital, their situations and experiences. From these conversations, she filtered out salient ideas, which were applied to the wall surfaces of the main stairwell in red paint using stencils. Taken out of its original context, the individual word consequently becomes a game of free association – a spontaneous combination of thoughts and feelings, which is related to conversation as a game of words and answers.
Norbert Axel Richter
