Gender & Space //Hannah Antema: telling sparrows of nightshade - A Sound Installation on Disability, Time, and Space
A sound-based installation oriented toward rest and listening. Spoken reflections and poems articulated from disabled and chronically ill lived experience form a sonic field in which space, time, and perception are sensed, negotiated, and endured.
telling sparrows of nightshade - A Sound Installation on Disability, Time, and Space
Modern architecture is deeply entangled with sickness and disability. From hygienist city plans to psychiatric institutions and everyday domestic spaces, it has functioned as a quiet medical apparatus: measuring, regulating, and normalising bodies. What is framed as progress has long relied on the erasure of fragility. Illness and disability are treated as disturbances to be managed or absorbed, rather than as conditions that generate knowledge. Standardisation promises clarity and leaves behind an echo chamber in which many spatial experiences remain unheard.
This project departs from that tension. It approaches illness and disability not as deficits, but as epistemic positions from which architecture’s assumptions about time, perception, and functionality become legible. At its centre lies a displaced temporality: time that accumulates, stalls, and fractures – time lived through slowness, repetition, and interruption. When time no longer aligns with normative rhythms, space itself begins to falter.
The installation unfolds as a sound-based situation oriented toward rest and listening. Its sonic material is formed through spoken reflections, poems articulated through the lived spatial experience of disability and chronic illness, illustrating how space is sensed, navigated, resisted, or endured. Language loosens its descriptive function and becomes rhythm, hesitation, breath. Out of these layers emerges a spatial alphabet – not a system of order, but a set of sonic gestures grounded in embodied experience. The body is not addressed as a neutral user, but assumed as vulnerable, dependent, and variably attuned.
The project is grounded in a broader theoretical investigation into architecture as a biopolitical dispositif, tracing how norms of health, productivity, and bodily coherence have been sedimented into space. From this research, writing and installation emerge as parallel gestures: one analytical, one experiential – each informing the other without collapsing into a single form.
What becomes possible when space is no longer conceived from the standpoint of the functional, autonomous body, but from bodies that tire, depend, and fall out of sync? And how might architecture shift if listening, rest, and temporal dissonance are treated not as exceptions, but as spatial foundations?
research and installation Hannah Antema
texts Billie Jamie Söntgen, Laura Arena, Luca Kosina, Dylan McNulty-Holmes, Lo Moran, Moira Heuer, Noël Labridy and Hannah Antema