The reverse of the panopticon

The reverse of the panopticon

The reverse of the panopticon, is the result, for the final moment... of an investigation I started in Guatemala in 2003. This series is the last phase of the project; there are forty images and a separate piece, Las Tablas de Moisés, a specular structure between two psychiatric hospitals, Federico Mora in Guatemala and one in Asuncion, Paraguay.

In a previous phase, I worked on the patient and the result was Prison or Refuge, a series that I exhibited in ArteXArte in 2007. Later on, some loose pieces were seen in different spaces.

In 2016, I returned to Guatemala with another outlook, this time focused on the illness and not on the patient. There I never walked alone nor had direct contact with the patients, it was always through a psychiatrist.

I portrayed the imprecise, the absence, the spectres, that other side to which madness pushes you without mercy.

In 2017 I entered the hospital in Asunción for the first time. There, except for the first day, I was always alone and in direct contact with the patients. I saw them unfold on a back and forth trip, asking me to photograph them, perhaps to recover a little of that lost identity?

I took notes.

The camera worked like a shield.

Mine was not a distant curiosity.

And Moses appeared, and with him the piece The Tables of Moses.

Moses works with a chalk or a stone, in one of the open-air patios of the hospital, he writes numbers and accounts, which in some way have to do with his former professional activity as a public accountant. He writes sentences with a strong religious intensity, right and left, in Spanish and in English, sentences that are wiped away by the rain and the wind and that he rewrites over and over again, in a daily repetitive act, charged with an impassive and peaceful obsession, far from the passage to the act that led him to murder the judge who turned the ruling against him during his divorce trial.

Art is to show and to hide, and that is what Moses does, he shows and hides without intervening in this, he leaves this doing to nature and he, impassive, shows again.

With this series I was invited by Pelusa Borthwick, Director of Arcimboldo Arte Contemporary for its annual show Libro de Artista, in 2019. Also that year a part of the images and video were exhibited in Hive Coworking, Asuncion.

Ticio Escobar, Fernando Moure and Paulina Zamora have written about the series.