Traumatic Measures

Traumatic Measuresis an exploration of Saavedra’s personal trauma when he was stabbed in Bogota, Colombia. The film realises his further search for rational explanations as a result of flashbacks experienced in London whilst encountering stories about knife crime. The project fixes on his mind’s experience, obsessed with an irrational need to understand and assess the event through a series of experiments and re-enactments. Inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his 1982 speech about the European obsession with measurement and categorization and the “Studies in Motion” by Muybridge, Saavedra designed specific experiments and grids to recreate the situation, both from the perspectives of the victim and the perpetrator, understanding the feelings from both sides of the crime through repetition. Though photography is used as a documenting mechanism to understand experiences, video is the media that enable Saavedra to travel through time back to the moment when the stabbing occurred.