Paky Vlassopoulou: Wandering Lines - Stories on Madness

“Wandering Lines: Stories on Madness” is a research on the history of madness and its institutionalization, driven by a personal story and the urgency to speak out loud about mental health in post-pandemic times of late capitalism “burnouts”. The title refers to the work of Fernand Deligny (1913–1996), an educator, writer and director, often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement. He was opposed to institutions of any kind and he initiated a series of collectively run residential programs where he developed pioneering methods of working and living with people with autism and other disabilities, determined to be “outside of speech”.

In 2020, I started a series of works revolving around the notion of confinement based on research I did on the island of Leros. Leros has a long history of incarceration where numerous military facilities, built during the island’s Italian occupation (1912–1943) have been used ever since for different types of institutional confinement. The most notorious case is the Leros Psychiatric Hospital, internationally known as “Europe’s guilty secret” because of the inhuman conditions under which the patients lived. In my most recent works, I looked into the architecture of confinement and dived into testimonies of inmates, while now my wish is to capture what it means for a person to be confined in their own body.

Within the period of the residency, through readings, interviews, and visits to healthcare institutions, I will collect images and stories around mental health. The goal is to create works that touch upon the fragility of human existence and celebrate marginalized beings who hold a unique knowledge.