Findings

In dialogue with the participants, maps are created to illustrate the spatial contexts of their biographies. After the participants’ life stories have been recorded using the Matrix Method, each event is linked to specific locations that played a role in the described situations. These locations are carefully identified and marked, allowing the geography of individual experiences to emerge. Each sentence is assigned to a place, creating a visual representation of the interconnectedness of events, actions, and spaces.

The process of mapping introduces a new perspective for both participants and observers. For participants, it externalizes their experiences, presenting their narratives as part of a larger spatial context. For outsiders, the maps serve as a means of understanding the broader implications of these individual journeys, highlighting not only the geographic but also the social dynamics of the spaces involved. The maps provide a dual function: they reflect the personal significance of specific locations while revealing overarching patterns within the public and communal spheres that shape and influence these lives.

Biographies

Matrix Ingeborg Kleinberg

Spaces

Santa cruz do bispo prison

the projects of the OUTCAST REGISTRATION operate in different topological spheres, that is, in spaces that reflect specific social functions and all have a private (individual) and a public (communal) meaning. The fact that private space is largely excluded highlights the problematic fact that the private sphere in democratic systems is fundamentally—and constitutionally—hidden from public view. While this does protect from state control and interference, it does not protect those who are exposed to (sexual) violence behind closed doors. For all the women who participated in the projects, the private space has never been a protective space, as is clear from their respective biographies—on the contrary. Since access to private space is denied, the OUTCAST REGISTRATION projects concentrate on social spaces that are accessible but under normal circumstances strictly separated from each other, and it is there that encounters or even confrontations are initiated between their inhabitants: — in isolated spaces, where segregated life far away from society is imposed, for example, in prisons, therapy facilities, psychiatric wards, and asylum seekers centres; — in cultural spaces, that is, institutionally legitimised and supported spaces and facilities, including museums, art halls and galleries, as well as, for example, playgrounds, parks, and zoos; spaces that are categorically in contrast to subcultural, secret, or even forbidden spaces for ideas, thoughts, and life styles, which are rejected by the majority and/or officially banished from the public sphere; — in the public realm, which ideally expresses the need and obligation of all people to be able to articulate in public everything that concerns all us, independent of whether they have been granted, have acquired, or have coerced authorisations and privileges. In the sense of Hannah Arendt, the sphere of what is public is not only a possibility, but rather a call to action.

a pre-printed catalogue of terms, both positively and negatively contextualisable, which are selected and assigned to the respective stages of life, and enable the women involved to provide information that is not emotionally charged or judgemental about traumatic experiences that had previously been impossible to communicate.

a biographical protocol that uses the Matrix Method to collect facts as soberly as possible which is devoid of emotional suggestion. From the resulting collages of words the biographers formulate sentences in the present tense, so that the events of the past are brought into the present.