Jian Shuang Cheok

BEYOND FOUR WALLS:
Manifestation of Trust in One’s World Ruled by Its Absence

“Soul murder” is a term that Dr. James Gilligan, uses to describe solitary confinement as it warps someone’s personality, the sense of their own aliveness, through the culture of mutual distrust, atrocious isolation and barely submerged abuse. Research has shown that individuals who have experienced solitary confinement were significantly associated with PTSD. One of the most pernicious effects of trauma, as Van der Kolk notes, is that it disrupts their ability to know what they feel — that is, to trust their gut feelings — and this distrust makes them misperceive threats where there is none.

While halfway houses have often been touted as a criminal justice tool, it describes a void, a shadow space that sits in a limbo of sorts, embodying an in-between, where the issue of PTSD is contempt.

This thesis addresses the absence. It investigates the mediation between the two modalities of the past security and the future freedom, seeking a laminal ground in which the gradation between is choreographed. The project proposes a juncture between ‘the prison’ and ‘the society’, a space in which the universality of the matter of PTSD within individuals who have experienced solitary confinement is conceived. This notion aims to reintroduce trust back into the traumatized, an abyss that was once in the state of oblivion, is now being recognized.