Film & Geography: Work/Health/Care

The project “Raum für Pflege” portrays the various demands, perceptions and limitations of care spaces. The experiences of four women and their individual approaches to spatial conceptions and their embedded power relations form an auditory topology which is consistently visually disrupted. The newly emerging space associations form the centrepiece of the work.

The project deals with the question of what it means to be healthy in our society and what role the body has in it. In her film, Ula Liagaite uses the book ‘The Hologram’ by activist, artist and author Cassie Thornton (2020) and asks about forms of self-organised, collaborative care practises beyond professional institutions.

What does it take to feel at home? The film gently portrays the spaces and practices of (self-)care of two Ukrainian women who found a new home with two Swiss families. Using participatory interview techniques, the audience is taken along into the intimate spaces and relationships of living together.

The project examines the manual handling of bodies and objects in professional and private life of health-care professionals and asks about the connections between physical and emotional touch. The identity-building dimension of spaces is subtly examined and shows how spaces are created and experienced by intimacy and distance.

The film portrays the former, now empty, St. Raphael Hospital in Küsnacht above Lake Zurich and negotiates the economic, political and spatial dimensions of care infrastructures. The hospital itself acts as a protagonist and leads through its own story in the first-person perspective. The changing and sometimes contradictory claims and power structures are hence critically investigated.

Based on interviews with health professionals, “Optimus Prime” provides an exaggerated portrait of the increasing labour intensity and burden on nurses. Through the use of fast, rhythmic image changes and scene repetitions, stressful situations are created that critically reflect the constant optimisation pressure in everyday health-care work.

How do people in public spaces react to small gestures of affection? In the project, the producers reflect on their interventionist experiment with a hidden camera in the city centre of Bern.