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Interior Design (MA)

Miriam Dreyer

It is the year 2052 and a new era has begun: The Near Past of Intergenerational Trauma. Inherited trauma patterns have become society‘s most dominant concern, with the popularization of psychoanalysis and domestic violence cases at an all-time high. In order to fight for intergenerational justice, the United Nations have established a UK heritage detection scheme. Family-run organizations like Charleston Estate are being examined and transformed into trauma processing centres to come to terms with the past.

This project asks how spatial intervention can help to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma?



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Miriam Dreyer is a German architectural designer. In her critical spatial practice she is mainly concerned with future sociological development. To her, every design decision is inherently political. Her current focus lies in the topic of complex trauma processing in the built environment, developing projects that are both research based and interactive.

Having been involved in a series of architectural projects, her recent collaborations range from design-oriented research, over post-pandemic office design, to large-scale art installations. She has worked on projects in London, New York, Aalborg, Barcelona and Berlin.

Miriam is the 2023 Interior Design cohort's student representative and runs the RCA's lecture series SuperSymposium.

18 paper cubes with colourful rorschach drawings printed on
Depending on their history, memories do not always want to be remembered - some become apparent, whereas some remain hidden, and exist in an underlying state. Depending on what we want to access, we might be able to reveal new thoughts. Who sees what, and how much of a context can be given between the lines?
woman holding a large papercube, puzzeling cubes
Memory cubes is about a multiplicity of parts. It is about the process of understanding and reflecting on and into the ev(id)ent. Trying to make sense of it, reordering, and reconstructing. A state in which trying to look for patterns becomes a repeated pattern itself.
woman holding large cubes sitting down
The project is about moving and being moved, puzzling together traces of memory as a dynamic discovery of the Self. It consists of two ink blot drawings printed on 18 paper cubes, each 30x30x30cm in size.
yellow cubes
blue cubes
inkblots layed on top of each other
"Post-traumatic stress disorder, by a neurological standpoint, is not a disorder, it's a reordering of your neural networks and sensory pathways." - Janet Seahorn, Ph.D, Neuroscience Researcher
It is the year 2052 and a new era has begun: The Near Past of Intergenerational Trauma. Inherited trauma patterns have become society‘s most dominant concern, with the popularization of psychoanalysis and domestic violence cases at an all-time high. In order to fight for intergenerational justice, the United Nations have established a UK heritage detection scheme. Family-run organizations like Charleston Estate are being examined and transformed into trauma processing centres to come to terms with the past.
render
people in space
trauma release exercises
trauma release exercises
cards for humanity
Inherited trauma is passed down by repetitive behaviour as much as it is genetically, with stress hormones changing the way DNA is read throughout three consecutive generations in a female line.