Alisa Gurevich

Alisa arrived at GSA from Russia after graduating with honours in Spatial Design and gaining work experience within the field. She spent the three years prior to relocation gaining and developing skills by practicing in design and architectural studios, taking part in competitions and building up a customer base in her hometown of Moscow.

Alisa is highly skilled in drawing, painting, sketching and model making, as well as being efficient in essential programs such as AutoCad, ArchiCad, Sketchup, Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign. She takes pride in her research skills and her determination to earn a living through design work.

Throughout her Masters Degree, Alisa chose socially relevant topics for her research. Starting with stratification of society, overpopulation and climate change and finishing her degree with a project inspired by domestic abuse trauma.

The final project was of great personal value for her as she was working on something that she has been through in her life, leaning on her own experience in order to hopefully help other victims of abuse to manage their trauma. Alisa drew satisfaction from challenging herself, social rules and beliefs while working on the project. By facing all of her traumas again she managed to create a new space where people would experience two kinds of abuse (in a virtual sense) and become aware of the scale of the problem.

The research started with the rewinding and analysing of her own personal experience and understanding how her traumas have affected her life and how abuse appeared there. After this, Alisa’s understanding of how trauma can linger in the human mind was altered. After every new step, her research entered into a lot of theoretical and psychological literature all connected to the kinds of abuse, traumas and memory distortion, (where it starts, the way it works) to support her own instinctive feelings about the issue.

The designed space in the project was born because of the entire research process – one step led to another and every one as integral as the last. The end result was a church interior where people can dive into their own memory and face their traumas at the same time as being inside the “citadel of violence”. The space has taken on the form of something spiritual but non-religious. Around the altar it is filled with fog that is created by fog machines located in transepts. Right in front of altar the glass ball is placed. The ball is filled with smoke and is made of photochromic glass that turns black in daytime when interacting with UV light.

This project is full of metaphors. The fog illustrates peoples’ memory and psyche which conceals our traumas and does not let us remember every single detail. It makes the viewer imagine what is hiding underneath and face their own demons. The ball itself illustrates our traumas and the fact that they are hidden from us and they never reveal themselves, apart from the time when the situation is the most dangerous – night, as people are most vulnerable then. The fact that the glass doesn’t let us see through defines the second level of defending the traumatic memory – that they are too deep to get to them on your own and that you never know if they influence your life in a positive or a negative way.

The path of the viewer is supposed to be very tense and is allowing the viewers to make their own choices: they can just leave the place or to go straight to the final point and experience the trauma, in the end its their choice – to break the ball and therefore to let the poisoning smoke out or to keep moving towards personal mental health and healing.