Caiana: Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual (Dec 2015)
Los alcances del dispositivo. Apuntes sobre fotografía y locura en la Argentina
Abstract
In the 80s, after the restoration of democracy, various forms of artistic expression were gaining notoriety in the field of visual production. The photographic essay, for example, began to have a unique role as a powerful visual constituted genre which made possible the visibility of certain social sectors, groups or silenced minorities. This work focuses on photographic essays by Eduardo Gil, Helen Zout and Adriana Lestido. Their material deals with specific places of detention and deprivation, particularly, neuropsychiatric hospitals. Photography, as a technical means that represent a specific know how, and considered as a device deployed in hospitals, can be an important part of the more comprehensive disciplinary order that constitute a psychiatric institution, which includes a particular arrangement of space, the professionals, their speeches and techniques and diverse control and registration mechanisms, as well as forms of confinement and isolation. I propose that the works of the chosen photographers, distance themselves decisively and significantly from the perspective of the hospital scopic regime by questioning the photographic statute itself, in its referential and performative dimensions, creating events that gave identity and visibility to subaltern subjectivities.
