This book of full colour images and essays accompanied ‘Out of Place’, an immersive installation with accompanying paintings by Maria Pesma in the twelfth-century Cambridge Leper Chapel, which ran from June 26-29, 2025, with integrated performances exploring the human voice by Cambridge-based in situ: on June 28 and 29.
Maria Pesma writes: “You can never successfully remove someone violently from a place they belong, because you cannot erase the gap they leave behind. The exhibition explored the nature of absence and was created specifically for the Leper Chapel as a response and a tribute to the early history of the place and to those who had been cast out socially, as well as to all those who have been exiled or refused entry or transported or removed from sight.”
The exhibition did not foreground the specific situation or experience of those afflicted by leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, although that is examined in parts of the book. Instead it opened out onto a much more general discriminatory and exclusionary tendency in modern socities and the many forms of marginalisation, segregation and displacement that this gives rise to. In this, it was also deeply concerned with the way traumatic events in the past are rarely ‘over and done with’ but continue to be felt in the present. Only in recognising this do we also recognise and properly value our common humanity.
This book provides context for a fuller understanding of how the different elements of the exhibition – the artwork, the physical space and its history, and the performance, as well as the history of social exclusion through to the present – were related to one another to form an integrated event. It is not just a record of that event, however, but a self-contained and meaningful publication in its own right.

You can read the Maria Pesma’s Introduction to the exhibition, with images, here and Anthony Stevens’ chapter on Social Exclusion here .

Publication date: June 10, 2025.

• Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9955939-8-5
• Paperback (15.24 x 22.86 cm; 218 pages) price £14.99.
• Available from: Amazon.uk