Interweaving Life and Death: Visual Narratives of Madness and Mental Illness in a Colombian Asylum
Sandra Lucía Castañeda
Artist and independent scholar
“There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.”
Antonin Artaud
I was born 49 years ago in Sibaté, a town near Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. This town, although small, has been famous since the late 1930s thanks to the construction and operation of four mental asylums dedicated to the care of the “insane.”
Sibaté is recognized as “the town of crazy people”, because the majority of Colombians diagnosed with some type of mental cognitive or behavioral disorder were sent to this town. This popular expression became generalized to such an extent that it was assumed that all the inhabitants of the municipality (including me) suffer from mental imbalances: schizophrenia, bipolarity, epilepsy, addictions, paranoia, catatonia, etc. The mental asylums were also recognized for its restrictive purposes, rather than for its curative and medical goals.
As a child, my family regularly took me to mass in one of the asylum chapels (since all the asylums were administered by different religious orders), and that is how I grew up seeing the faces of madness and mental illness as if they were my own. Throughout the years, I continued to marvel not only at the mystery that enveloped those who lived behind the walls of the mental asylums, but also by the walls themselves.
Today, I propose to expose how and why I have narrated and interpreted the ways in which life and death have been intertwined in a chaotic manner, in a place that for many people was and still is considered cursed: the psychiatric hospital of Sibaté.
In order to do this, I will begin by briefly contextualizing the conditions of possibility in which Sibaté’s mental asylums emerged. Then, I will present how the old psychiatric hospital in Sibaté is portrayed today because of its history. Finally, I will explain why my current work involves the creation of visual narratives of this hospital in order to recover and re-create a visual memory of what has been experienced by those who were between those walls but also, to recover the perspective of the town’s inhabitants in relation to the asylums as a space of confinement where life and death are not seen as two opposites but they are seen as an intertwined state.
The “modern psychiatric hospital” in Sibaté: from the “Ship Of Fools” to the Great Asylum
As an academic, I have dedicated several years analyzing the emergence of madness and its historical development in Sibaté. In the theoretical base of my research project, Michel Foucault’s studies have always been present by giving me some insights to propose my own interpretation of what happened there. Foucault wanted to show that history is not a linearity towards progress as seen in the nineteenth century, but that it is constituted by ruptures and discontinuities. I agree with him. However, the French thinker stated that what underlay each of the Renaissance, Classical, and Modern epochs in the Western society was a particular and unifying set of rules to configure knowledge.
Nevertheless (and this is my thesis), in Colombia—a Western society—, because of its historical, political, economic, social, and cultural particularities, the set of rules characteristic of the Eurocentric modernizing project was not carried out, and Sibaté’s mental asylums are proof of this. The modern Colombian civilizing project, led by the country's scientific and intellectual elites, was not successful in these institutions for various reasons.
Perhaps one of the most important reasons was that, although Sibaté’s asylums were founded under the precepts of modern science and the Eurocentric civilizing project; madness and mental illness, two different categories in form and time, were juxtaposed, and understood and treated in unison with a series of practical knowledge of different particular cultural epochs that most of the time opposed themselves. The faces of each other were seen as one and the same.
Thus, meanwhile the asylums in Sibaté were intended to be architectural copies of modern German psychiatric hospitals, as it was believed that the location and the structure of the building would contribute to the mental and physical recovery of patients; madness and mental illness coexisted indistinctly under the same roof of those buildings. While madness was
seen as a moral degeneration that threatened the social order proposed for the time, since it called into question all the unshakable truths that reigned in the social panorama of the time; mental illness began to be recognized as an alteration. Cognitive, behavioral, or emotional alteration, in which psychological processes such as consciousness, emotion, cognition, behavior, learning, the language, etc., makes it difficult for people to adapt to the social environment in which they live, creating a kind of subjective discomfort. In Sibaté, both the insane with questionable morals and the mentally ill with abnormal behavior and diseased minds received the same psychiatric treatments, but the relationship between them and both the doctors and those in charge of administering the relevant care, as well as the inhabitants of the town and visitors, oscillated between mercy and cruelty, tenderness and merciless mockery, respectful admiration and public scorn.
Foucauldian attempts to show the role of madness in Western society begins with the end of leprosy in Europe and the emergence of madness as a replacement for leprosy at the end of the Middle Ages. Lepers were formerly isolated within the community in special sanatoria. Although the disease of leprosy disappeared, the structures that surrounded it remained.
The “Ship of Fools” which wandered the waterways of Europe was a symbol of this process during the Renaissance. Great uneasiness arose about madmen. Fantastic images of madness that associated it with dark secrets and apocalyptic visions became important.
Sibaté’s mental asylums came to resemble from time to time “The Ship of Fools”. From the streets of many towns and cities in Colombia, those who were believed to be able to spread madness just as it happened with leprosy and other evils typical of the Middle Ages, and destroy humanity as it was known, were collected and sent to the mental asylum houses. The health system considers it necessary to protect the healthy/normal people by removing the insane/abnormal from them.
During the Modern epoch, madness was expelled to the outskirts of the Western world, along with a range of other social deviance. In Sibaté, the enormous houses of asylum were created and power was exercised in a similar way that it occurred in Europe some decades ago.
Many insane people confined in the four Sibaté’s asylums were not confined because they needed medical attention, but because the power of the state needed to control them and by separating them from “normal” society, the state sought to define itself. Only by controlling the abnormal can the “normal” exist.
The asylum as the contemporary theater of cruelty
“Society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastiness.”
― Antonin Artaud
The Department of Welfare of Cundinamarca (La Beneficencia de Cundinamarca) was created in 1869, within the framework of liberal reforms, with the purpose of responding to the problems of poverty that characterized Colombian society at the end of the 19th century. The objective of this official entity was to create a set of institutions attached to the State that would be in charge of social assistance. However, the economic difficulties faced by sovereign states and the lack of qualified technical personnel to carry out assistance activities, made the administration of assistance fall fundamentally on religious institutions.
The psychiatrist in Colombia, from 1916 to 1937, marked an new era in which the science and modernization discourses of the Eurocentric civilizing project were the central pillars of the society.
The construction of the modern Sibaté’s Neuropsychiatric Hospital, the biggest in South America at that time, was ordered by the Department of Welfare of Cundinamarca in 1921 in order to create an adequate space for the scientific study, care, and treatment of the country’s mentally alienated.
The project was led by the psychiatric society of the time with the support of the Catholic Church, as a moralizing agent, opened its doors for the first time on August 10th, 1937. But there, despite the psychiatric standards to be followed, some patients who were branded as “insane” for not fulfilling the duties assigned by society to their gender, sex, social or marital status, among other deviations, were isolated and subjected to the same procedures that many of the mentally ill had, such as shock therapies, insulin therapies, and lobotomies.
The “golden years” of the Julio Manrique hospital lasted more than six decades until 2004 when the Comptroller’s Office of the Department of Cundinamarca, in an investigation where the medical records of 36,000 patients were collected, indicated that the hospital, after being audited for two years, was in critical condition. Shortly afterwards, the news and newspapers of the time announced that the hospital ceased to have an operating permit from the Ministry of Health, because in its facilities the water consumed by patients contained more than 200 pathogenic microorganisms called Escherichia Coli, characteristic of stool. In addition to this, cremations were carried out in the hospital without authorization from the State.
Public control entities and the media also denounced that some of the graves in the cemetery of the old hospital—where patients abandoned by their families were buried, or those who had died of ailments related to their mental problems, heart attacks, kidney obstructions, encephalopathies or cancer—were violated to perform satanic rituals. In the rituals religious images were burned and graffiti allusive to the devil were made.
Julio Manrique: a new reality show
“The Ship of Fools”, appeared as leprosy vanished. It was a literary device that had a real existence. The Sibaté asylum, nowadays an urban legend and a center of attraction for ghost-houses, mediums, and all those interested in paranormal matters, also had a real existence. A real existence that is gaining more and more interest from the general public thanks, to a large extent, to the proliferation of entertainment shows that exploit the idea of insanity as a means to express and localize concerns about the darker side of life and fear of the end of the world.
Let’s not forget that madness has been important in tales and fables. In such tales, the insane speaks the truth.
Since decades ago, creators and producers of horror shows exploit the fact that the public loves to hear the voice of madness because “it tells the truth”. An insane who was dead while he was alive and now, trapped between the walls of the old sanatorium, wants to reveal the anguish that afflicts him and that does not let him finally rest in peace. And this is where reality shows make their triumphal entry. In them, the madman is portrayed as an uncontrollable residue of society, who has had an image (like everything unknown and incomprehensible that humans seeks to materialize) that throughout history has been associated with the dichotomy between good/bad, light/darkness, stability/chaos, stability/disorder. These kinds of shows, with the participation of experts on the subject, try to explain the, perhaps, inexplicable: the paranormal events observed in the old asylum. Such events often manifest terrifying moments lived by many of those who were held there: tortures, and alleged murders and suicides.
In “Sigue” of La W Radio, a renowned show from Colombia, the participants of the investigation spoke about supposed paranormal activity in the Neuropsychiatric Hospital of Sibaté. Their investigation was carried out last February 20th, from 10:00 p.m. to 5 a.m. through a live broadcast.
Rafa Taibo, announcer, actor, narrator and director of the transmission, commented: “we have the dream of showing our followers second by second” this investigation. “Really dramatic situations developed” in this hospital, such as suicides and murders. “It seems to us that it is a unique place for our followers to live the terrifying story.” “I am looking for tangible proof that there is a paranormal energy in this place. My goal is to explain how such energy is the cause of unknown and uncanny events. If we could get irrefutable proof of the afterlife, we would change the way we understand reality. I don’t mind skepticism, we are not here to prove anything to anyone.” He concluded.
For her part, Ayda Valencia, an expert in paranormal phenomena, explained that this research involves important production work: “before going to the places to record, we do an exploration to see, through psychophony, if they really exist or not. We rely on these devices to help find these beings that communicate with us from other planes.” During the exploration, Valencia was able to “visualize many people who died and are grieving, trying to talk to us.”
According to Taibo and Valencia, this hospital is an ideal place to contact the dead. This is due to the story of Gloria Guerrero, a former nurse at the Sibaté hospital, who said that “during hours of the day, after she was admitted to the hospital, she saw a nurse dressed in white with a plaid scarf “. When greeting him, he did not answer, only raised his head.
Guerrero went to her companions to find out if she knew him. It was at that moment that her colleagues told her the horrifying story: They “told me that this nurse died because of a patient who hanged him with that same scarf.”
Surely, given the intrigue that the history of the place and stories of its former inhabitants generates in locals and foreigners, we will continue to watch more shows that try to reveal the mysteries that insanity and mental illness hold in Sibaté.
My visual narratives
As an artist, my current work is an attempt re-create a visual memory of what has been experienced by those who were between those the walls of the psychiatric hospital but also, to recover the perspective of the town’s inhabitants in relation to the asylums as a space of confinement where life and death are not seen as two opposites but they are seen as an intertwined state.
Keywords: art and mental illness, evil, insanity, madness, neuropsychiatric hospital, paranormal, psychiatry, Sibaté-Colombia
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