Esto es un agujero
2020/Ongoing project
Under the title Esto es un agujero (This is a hole) includes a last wide series of works that analyzes the practice of interior design within the total prison institution and proposes an approach to the form and function of objects framed in a context of deprivation of liberty, isolation, surveillance and punishment. The research raises the idea that the shape and color of the furniture are another discipline that allows control of the body, guaranteeing the subjection of its forces and imposing a docility-utility relationship. The project’s research points to an entire international theoretical and practical movement on the use of color in prisons from 1980 to the present. The «Baker-Miller pink» case, RGB # FF91AF, was the most popular.
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2. FACILITIES AND MATERIAL MEDIA
The Carabanchel Penitentiary Psychiatric Hospital is located in a building built in 1952 on the road from Carabanchel to Aluche, located in the penitentiary between the Youth Detention Center and the Provincial Prison for Men. Within the walls that enclose the establishment there are three differentiated areas: the rectangular entrance pavilion where the administrative units, the guardhouse and the Director’s office are located; then in the area behind this building and once the first rake has been crossed are the infirmary, the medical consultations, the unused x-ray room and the office of the Head of Service, as well as the parlor. After a second portico are the inmates’ pavilions, five in total, arranged perpendicularly in relation to the main office and consultation pavilion, architecturally acquiring the shape of a comb, with courtyards between the pavilions. Each pavilion has two floors plus the ground floor. The inmates are distributed by the pavilions according to their situation, preventive, judicial, criminal, drug addicts. The great majority of the convicts are nurses, when fulfilling this function within the establishment, distributed throughout all the wards. The structure of each floor is composed of a room of about thirty square meters in the front area with a double use, a dining room and a TV room, and then on both sides of a corridor are the cells of the inmates, individual for the nurses, two, three and four beds for the rest of the inmates, clearly insufficient, without any possibility of privacy. The cells have a toilet separated by a glass that is missing in most of them. The central pavilion, which is accessed with great security measures, houses the «Agitated Unit» on one floor, which we will talk about later. In the next pavilion you will find the «toxic» section. These two sections are by far the most seedy in the entire establishment, we will describe their characteristics in detail later. Both remain isolated from the rest of the establishment, they have different regimes, of isolation.(…)»
REPORT ON THE PENITENTIARY PSYCHIATRIC ASSISTANCE CENTER OF MADRID (*)
Alicia ROIG SALAS, Teresa CAPILLA, Serafín CARBALLO and Enrique GONZÁLEZ DURO
(*) Report of the Legislation Commission of the Spanish Association of Neuropsychiatry presented to the Board of Directors. 1985
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