No Safe Place

No Safe Place addresses the subject of trauma and the process of healing, and emerges from the artist’s own experience of being the subject of a violent attack and the subsequent social expectation to bring the episode to closure and move on. The publication investigates, through texts, conversations, and Brandt’s artworks themselves, why healing can be such a difficult and perhaps ultimately unsuccessful process; why people appear to expect that a person will heal as a matter of course; and how society places emphasis on the perpetrators of violent crime rather than on the victims. In the context of this, the book also discusses the status of the image as witness, and the socio-cultural ‘resistance’ to the witness. The book features an essay on ‘The Forensics of Trauma’ by curator Jeppe Ugelvig, conversations between Peter Brandt and author Thomas Lagermand Lundme and theatre director Iben Hendel Philipsen, as well as texts and reproductions of artworks by Brandt that directly address his experience of the violent act and the attempt to heal.