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.

My main concern while creating the project was to ensure that the performers were not exposed to "error." I didn't want them to get yelled at by visitors because they nearly spilled something on them, or to be admonished because they "didn't do their job properly." In the end, I didn't have to take any action. Most people were immediately at ease with how they served the drinks. Some even expressed camaraderie with the servers who offered them more alcohol, while others appreciated the project's emphasis on concentration and balance, as well as the opportunity it provided for reflection on social interactions. As a result, I began to wonder "if an institution can create the sense that people who attend art events and exhibitions can breach social conventions safely (simply by serving a little more alcohol). And if we, as artists, make the disciplined appear undisciplined."

I'm growing increasingly fascinated with the concept of safety.

Returning to the world of mental health, I started to consider issues such as not feeling safe in your own body, the function of confined institutional spaces, and whether or not fear and unsafety are associated with insanity.

Having been involved with institutional spaces, I began to think about the body as a spatializing mechanism and to associate personal space with the concept of shelter. A shelter is a space that, while providing a desired—sometimes even idealized—sense of security, is established in response to a need that frequently arises following a violent or traumatic event. With this in mind, I began creating clay micro-sculptures that simulated imaginary shelters. Looking for a correspondence between the forms of the shelter and the body, I turned to a series of works I had started in the summer of 2023, inspired by traditional clay beehives I had seen in Kythnos during the Thermia project.

Based on many conversations and synergies that occurred both during and after the residency, I intend to continue the projects and research I began at AiR by focusing on how artistic intention can be shaped collectively, the type of space that can host such an endeavor, and how the art event can become an ongoing exercise in self-determination for all individuals involved.