Collective Identity Stories: Mental Health

How do individual experiences become collective stories?

For this group project, my group and I chose to pick a very common collective identity story and create our own interpretation of it. We chose to promote the theme of mental health awareness through a multimedia installation. Inspired by “Heureux soient les fêlés, car ils laisseront passer la lumière” by French visual artist Olivier Ratsi we produced our own overwhelming installation which – like his – was more of an immersive experience.

Research:

Olivier Ratsi is based in Paris. He is mainly known for his work of immersive installations involving spatial perception.

“Blessed are the cracked because they will let the light through invites a change of state, a singular regeneration of angles of view, postures, points of attention and relationship to what surrounds us. Through optical phenomena (set of infinities, optical illusions, anamorphosis, mirrors) and geometric lines, our gaze, between consciousness and unconsciousness, is impregnated and damaged while giving life to a dozen installations. hybrids set imperceptibly in motion.”

https://gaite-lyrique.net/en/event/heureux-soient-les-feles-car-ils-laisseront-passer-la-lumiere-olivier-ratsi

https://youtu.be/a8ZLKS6yBCw

To make an individual experience such as mental health – a rather taboo subject – into a collective experience, we projected a video that we edited by us on the four walls of a dark room, accompanied by an overwhelming and overlapping sound piece. The projections, along with the sound, are meant to mirror mental health in an exaggerated way, presenting the way mental health used to and is still seen in such a negative light. To do so, we created an overwhelming and uncomfortable atmosphere, with inspiration from Olivier Ratsi. It mainly is up to the person experiencing it to interpret it as they wish, as it is a very immersive experience that we are inflicting on them.