Other Actors is a new, three-channel film piece by Stanley Picker Fellow Ilona Sagar, exploring the links between bodies and buildings, health and architecture through the lens of the Paimio Sanatorium in Finland. Designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto and completed between 1929 and 1933, the sanatorium represents a radical shift in the design for health. Conceived as an "instrument for healing" the Aaltos' proposed an architecture designed not for the verticality of the healthy body but for the horizontal perspective of the sick. At the time of filming, the sanatorium is at a significant moment in its transition from hospital to a new purpose. As restoration progresses, the film examines its status as a building in flux. Notions of care and maintenance are pivotal in this project. As time moves and agendas change, so does what is being maintained, what survives and what is valued. Featuring prominent theorists Beatriz Colomina, Heini Hakosalo, and Peter Stadius, Other Actors asks us to consider what we do with the architectural legacies of modernism that linger in our cultural imaginary, and how we can platform those who would normally be hidden behind its visual facades. 

 

Sagar worked in close collaboration with those who have lived and worked in Paimio Sanatorium, including the former maintenance staff, workers at the furniture manufacturer Artek, and surviving architects of the Aaltos' design team, whose accounts embody real knowledge of the building, speaking intimately to the archive and its importance. Other Actors is informed by collaboration with Aalto University School of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering as well as the Tuberculosis Research Group at Leicester University and Imperial College London, highlighting an urgent contemporary perspective on a disease often thought to be a relic of the past.

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Accompanying the main film was an audio piece, co-written by Flis Holland and Ilona Sagar to be experienced in the Paimio chair a seat originally designed to aid breathing in tuberculosis patients. The audio piece weaves together personal and historical narratives, structured through the archival cataloguing system used to organise photographic records in the Paimio Sanatorium archives. The audio navigates fragmented registers of voice, memory, and bureaucracy.

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A full list of credits can be found here.

Exhibition documentation: Andy Keate

Event documentation: Faith McKie

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Discursive events:

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During Ilona Sagar’s exhibition at the Stanley Picker Gallery, three discursive events were held. Each event encouraged all attendees to engage in an open conversation led by a series of invited speakers.

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Designing for Health: Bodies, Buildings & the Leaky Legacies of Modernism 

with Douglas Murphy, Penny Sparke and Aoife Donnelly 

 

Horizontal Knowledges

with Juliet Jacques & Owen Hatherley  

 

Borders, Bodies, Viral Landscapes & Latent Archives with Pranabashis Haldar, Marsha Rosengarten, Jana Scholze and Andrea Cooper

 

 

​​​​​​​​​​Commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, funded by The Saastamoinen Foundation and Arts Council England with additional support from The Aalto Foundation and Goldsmiths University London.​​​​