abandoned asylums
↑Environmental Graffiti carries a ↑collection of 34 photographies shot at 10 different abandoned and meanwhile decaying former mental institutions in Great Britain. The pictures are haunting and really give me the creeps. After viewing them you know that all the versions of ↵Arkham Asylum are not the products of imagination.
I bet these hospitals were just as creepy when they were still in use. In fact the whole instition ‘psychiatric hospital’ or even psychiatry itself is something that sometimes makes me think a lot. Not in a positive way. And even though I do not agree many arguments of ‘anti-psychiatric-movements’ I would say, that psychiatry is a huge source of human rights violations and yet totally acceptable (or at least ignorable) by our society. There is a documentary showing the workflow in a french hospital but I can’t remeber the title right now, but it is worth watching.
The photographer has done a great job capturung the decay and how nature strikes back on one hand and the hopelessness that is still implied by the bare structures of the buildings on the other. At least there can’t be done an more damage to human beings.
Found the documentary: ‘Alltag in der Psychiatrie: Die Pariser Klinik Saint-Anne’ by Ilan Klipper (2010). It is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd5b-ZP2QyQ. As I said before, it shows the everyday workflow in a french hospital and even though I know the movie it still is shocking to see, how thoughtless force is applied to the patients, absolutly regardless of the patients’ feelings or anxieties.
On youtube I also discovered another documentary I almost forgot about: ‘Kinder unter Kontrolle’ by Marie-Pierre Jaury (2009) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzhz2gZ3wOo&feature=related). This one deals with the topic, whether criminal behavior is caused by pathologic reasons and if they are pathologic, how it is possible to stop the ‘deviant developments’ of children while still in childhood (through drugs for example). This made my transhumanism-bell ring ^^
I got a bit carried away on this one but SCNR