Castillo negro

2014/ 2019

«I think I remember that the most tremendous testimonies were those of the sick, who were very deteriorated, but not as one tends to think of the Institutions, who «are stupid», who do not know, who are demented. No, no, they had their sensitivity, and their complaints too. In addition, I suppose that, as in all these commissions that go, the prisoners, those who were worse, the sick-prisoners or the prisoners-sick whatever you want to call it, were the ones who were very eager to speak because they thought that the commission was he going to help them or that he was going to bring them a benefit. Most of them didn’t have a lawyer, or they didn’t know if they had a lawyer or they didn’t have … Nothing. His rights were absolutely obsolete. The average stay, I don’t know if we calculate it, I suppose we did, but it was long. In the old psychiatric legislation it was up to the cure, and the cure can be infinity. I remember telling the sick not to allege mental illness because they were going to absolve them, but that could be an indefinite sentence. I, who later directed a psychiatric hospital in Andalusia, found myself with judicial patients who were there, scattered. There was no ward for them, in that sense there was more rationality, there was no kind of segregation within the asylum, depending on their clinical status they were in one ward or another. We began to review all the judicial patients who were there and why they were there and, well, they were lost in the «din of the times». Neither the patient knew why he was there, nor did anyone know anything. It was an absolute abandonment. Because that was at the disposal of the doctors. The doctors gave an opinion saying that he was cured and then the judge released them. These patients could theoretically be discharged, as long as the judge decreed it, after the corresponding doctor’s report. The corresponding doctor, who rarely went to the asylum, and did not want trouble or problems, never made a report of that type, because: What if something happens? … It was not advisable for any patient to claim mental illness, unless it was so obvious that it could not be denied. But there were many people who, naively, thought: – We have been acquitted! And many lawyers participated in this deception. What they did not know was the second part. The second part was: internment until he was completely cured. And of course, many sick people spent much longer than they would have had if they had been common criminals. Many served a very long sentence, until they died. » «It was a kind of … I don’t know how to define it … the abandonment of a people who had no social power to protest. The mentally ill was much worse than the normal prisoner, because the normal prisoner knew his sentence, knew that he could benefit from prison benefits x, whatever they were. Time was not eternal. For the mentally ill it was eternal: no That is why we asked for a legal review of the cases, if they had served the sentence, if they had not served it. Anyway, that a study be made of the prison legal situation of all those people, who were absolutely abandoned.  I understand that from the prison point of view, although I am not an expert in this matter, but I understand that what matters is the penalty, serving the sentence. What is this that an individual because he has a character or another character is have to treat differently?.»

Transcript of the interview with Enrique González Duro, (La Guardia de Jaén, 1939) is a Spanish psychiatrist, university professor, historian and writer.

Madrid, 2014

Project whose starting point is an anthropomorphic plaster sculpture by Manuel Delgado Villegas, el Arropiero (1943-1998), between the years 1970 and 1980 during his confinement in the Madrid Prison Psychiatric Center Prison Psychiatric Carabanchel. Based on this work, a three-dimensional representation of a human head, Black Castle proposes a visual and sonorous reflection on the place of madness and its complex and difficult habitability. In a concentric sense, paying special attention to the organ of insanity and the suffering of its symptoms, and in a perimetral or adjacent sense, taking into account exogenous factors such as the place where the mentally ill people live, the asylum, whether penitentiary or civil, And the excellent curative and / or palliative therapies that throughout history reason has devised to expel morbid thoughts from their territory.

The results were shown in the individual exhibition Castillo negro in the Espacio Olvera gallery (Seville). January, February and March 2019.

This works has been produced with the support of the grant to Creation program 2017 of the City Council of Madrid.

Art critic article: «Dar forma a la mente criminal» by Ivan de la Torre Americhi. ABC Cultural. 2 February 2019.