RESEARCH

how to approach the taboo topic of violence? 🚩🚩🚩

Violence against women reveals battered bodies, covered blue eyes, and silenced voices. All too often, bad experiences are concealed due to shame and stigmatization. This protects not the victims, but perpetrators – so they continue.

hiding behind flowers

Flowers are non-verbal means of communication for people, using bouquets to express feelings, wishes, apologies, complaints, etc. without words. Moreover, due to their delicacy, flowers are also a symbol of protection against war and violence („They have weapons, but we have flowers“).

Sharing personal experiences of violence can initiate the healing process of other women. With regard to my research, I wanted to interview women about their experiences anonymously in order to bring them to light within a protected space. The tension between experiences of violence, power, and loss of face for victims determines whether a woman will reveal herself as a victim. So I developed a Padlet for participation and sent them out anonymized.

how to approach the taboo topic of violence in VR?

First, I arranged colors and dynamics in Mozilla Hubs as a basic arrangement for the individual elements in the empty VR space. Here the focus is on the proportions and the wave motion of the pink sea.

Modell for Virtual Reality

Based on the organic floral motifs, I wanted to design an angular architectural counterweight to the soft floral forms. It was important to me to maintain certain transparency and a weightless space in which the heavy stories are floating in gravity. As neutrally as possible, I experimented with different basic shapes. Providing that neither gravity nor deviations exist in VR the architectural form of a water reservoir seemed very suitable to me. According to alternative theories, water has a memory. I designed a „memory reservoir“.