Project Description
The Hansen Home: Short Stories of Moments Past Growing up as kids in Jerusalem, the Hansen Hospital was always an imposing presence for our curiosity. The tall walls that surrounded it – which had seemed ever so taller then – offered a fantasy mechanism to enhance our imagination. Those massive, enchanted walls drew us ever nearer, as close as curiosity would permit, while protecting us from the fearful unknown lying beyond. In recent years we have come to know the Hansen House again. In these renewed encounters, in which we grew to love and admire the place and what it stands for, we discovered a different world, not quite what we had imagined it to be: a heterotopian space, a world within a world. The real wall, it seems, was actually a mental border, acting as a cruel, deceiving separator. Since its foundation in 1887 as an open leprosy asylum, this institution was also a home – open and transparent, personal, accepting and warm. As such, it was surrounded by ‘transparent’ borders – psychological boundaries of anxiety, fear and shame, which set the place so totally apart from its adjacent neighborhood. Our project reveals fractal memories from the daily life that occurred in the house. Through these we explore wider questions of the place’s meaning and significance, past and present. The found materials we collected include archival photos, diary entries from nurses and doctors, notes tucked in old books. We offer to look at them again, like arrested theatrical scenes. By the use of Augmented Reality, new layers of time reopen to an intimate, unconditioned observation, providing a look at memories and past experiences as a complex reflection of the present. Exhibits include a series of eight books and two interactive installations, presented in the entrance area and the stairway on the right.
Project Details
Project: Interactive installations and Augmented Reality Books
Client: Hansen House for Media and Technology
Collaborating with: Alon Chitayat, , Shalom Amira
