Post Trauma Documents
2011 - 15
By Annelise Schübeler
“In Brandt’s project, Post Trauma Documents (2001-15), the themes of trauma and loss of identity are renegotiated. As Brandt explains in connection with the introduction to the artworks, they circle around the experience of being outside the ‘common human experience’ and the sensation of invisibility and un-reality that follows on from that experience. The underplayed aesthetic of the artwork, Post Trauma Document: procura della generale repubblica, with its white silk background and orange pieces of material at the top combined with huge red letters and the much smaller letters in pencil remind us of an official document, only in a homemade, deconstructed format. In the text, Brandt explores the way the system regards the victim as a potential criminal, where an interview with the police develops into an interrogation. When, at a later stage, the ‘I’ asks for a copy of the police report, he is told that it does not exist. Society has discarded his experience and he has been rendered invisible. He is erased from society’s collective memory and the report is non-existing, as if the assault had never happened.
In Post Trauma Document: letter to x (2011-15), which consists of appliqued silk and pencil, the subject is rendered invadable, much like the torn silk of the broken boundary between the ‘I’ of the text and the assailant. The silk appears as an inner world with unstable and overlapping boundaries while the writings in pencil tries to establish an identity. The text is the victim’s inner dialogue with the assailant, where the ‘I’ through its identification with him reaches an acknowledgement of the fact that the assailant never left him. The assault’s dehumanizing effect is thus continued in the continued presence of the assailant as part of the victim, and thus a porous and dehumanized subject appears in Brandt’s artwork. It is related to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s including ethics, where the subject also encompasses dehumanization. It contrasts the universal subject, who cannot encompass dehumanization, and Brandt’s work thus destabilizes the basic, universal subject position, which has historically belonged to man”. (Annelise Schübeler, Peter Brandt’s gendered dialogues, in the book Post Trauma Documents, page 19 – 20, 2016).
Post Trauma Documents, 15 textile works individually titled (silk, pencil, oil paint, indian ink, marker pen), variable sizes 2011 – 15. 1 Ink jet print: Post Trauma Documents: back to the crime scene, roma 22 x 16 cm 2011 – 15, 1 object: Post Trauma Documents: ashes to ashes, glass container, ashes of medical reports 2002 – 2006, 24 x 10 x 10 cm. 2011 – 15