Ilona Sagar

Other Actors is a new, major three-channel film piece (film length 59’40” ) by Stanley Picker Fellow Ilona Sagar, exploring the links between bodies and buildings, health and architecture through the lens of the Paimio Sanatorium in Finland. Designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto and completed between 1929 and 1933, the sanatorium represents a radical shift in the design for health. Conceived as an “instrument for healing” the Aaltos’ proposed an architecture designed not for the verticality of the healthy body but for the horizontal perspective of the sick. At the time of filming, the sanatorium is at a significant moment in its transition from hospital to a new purpose. As restoration progresses, the film examines its status as a building in flux.

Sagar’s film features prominent theorists Beatriz Colomina, Heini Hakosalo, and Peter Stadius, whose expertise offer a nuanced exploration at the intersections of architecture, medicine, and technology, within broader societal contexts.

Other Actors is informed by collaboration with Aalto University School of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering as well as the Tuberculosis Research Group at Leicester University and Imperial College London, highlighting an urgent contemporary perspective on a disease often thought to be a relic of the past. Sagar worked in close collaboration with those who have lived and worked in Paimio Sanatorium, including the former maintenance staff, workers at the furniture manufacturer Artek, and surviving architects of the Aaltos’ design team, whose accounts embody real knowledge of the building, speaking intimately to the archive and its importance.

The film asks us to consider what we do with the architectural legacies of modernism that linger in our cultural imaginary, and how we can platform those who would normally be hidden behind its visual facades.

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Commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University and The Saastamoinen Foundation, The Aalto Foundation with additional support from Goldsmiths University London.