Between the Living and the Dead (A Halloween Conference)

Sandra Lucía Castañeda

Artist and independent scholar

“There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.”

― Antonin Artaud

I was born 49 years ago in Sibaté, a town near Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. This town, although small, has been famous since the late 1930s thanks to the construction and operation of four mental asylums dedicated to the care of the “insane.”

Sibaté is recognized as “the town of crazy people,” because the majority of Colombians diagnosed with some type of mental cognitive or behavioral disorder were sent to this town. This popular expression became generalized to such an extent that it was assumed that all the inhabitants of the municipality (including me) suffer from mental imbalances. The mental asylums were also known for their restrictive purposes, rather than for their curative and medical goals.

As a child my family regularly took me to mass in one of the asylum chapels. During that time I experienced regular contact with those who lived in the asylums. That is how I grew up seeing the faces of madness and mental illness in such a familiar way, as if they were my own. Throughout the years I continued to marvel, not only at the mystery that enveloped those who lived behind the walls of the mental asylums, but also by the walls themselves.

Today I will show you why and how I have interpreted and narrated the ways in which life and death have been intertwined in a chaotic manner, in a place that for many people was and still is considered to be cursed: the psychiatric hospital of Sibaté.

I will begin by briefly contextualizing the conditions in which Sibaté’s mental asylums emerged. I will then explain how the old psychiatric hospital in Sibaté is viewed now, in light of its history. Finally, I will present my current artwork; a visual narrative of not only the experience of those who lived within the asylum walls, but also the perspective of the town’s inhabitants outside the asylum walls.

The “Modern Psychiatric Hospital” in Sibaté: From the “Ship Of Fools” to the Great Asylum

As an academic, I have dedicated several years analyzing the emergence of madness and its historical development in Sibaté. My own interpretation of what happened at Sibaté, has been strongly influenced by the studies of Michel Foucault. Foucault proposed that history is not a linearity towards progress, as thought in the 19th century, but that it is constituted of ruptures and discontinuities. On this, I agree with him. However, Foucault also maintained that what underlies each of the Renaissance, Classical, and Modern ages in the Western society was a unifying and particular epistemology, a set of rules for forming knowledge. This is where my perspective diverges.

I propose that Foucault’s ideas related to the unifying epistemology that underlays Western societies do not entirely fit many of these, including Colombia. This is due to its historical, political, economic, social, and cultural particularities. The set of rules characteristic of the eurocentric modernizing project was not carried out in Colombia, and Sibaté’s mental asylums are proof of this. The modern Colombian civilizing project, led by the country’s scientific and intellectual elites, was not successful in these institutions for various reasons.

Perhaps one of the most important reasons was that, although Sibaté’s asylums were founded under the precepts of modern science and the eurocentric civilizing project, madness (morality and soul) and mental illness (mind/body)ad developed in different categories in form and time. They were juxtaposed: understood and treated in unison with a series of practical knowledge of different epochs that most of the time opposed themselves. The faces of madness and mental illness were seen as one and the same.

Thus, meanwhile the asylums in Sibaté were architectural copies of modern German psychiatric hospitals, as it was believed that the location and the structure of the building would contribute to the mental and physical recovery of patients; madness and mental illness coexisted indistinctly under the same roof of those buildings.

Madness was seen as a moral degeneration that threatened the social order proposed for the time, because it called into question all the unshakable truths that reigned in the social panorama of the time. Mental illness began to be recognized as a cognitive, behavioral, or emotional alteration, where problems with psychological processes would make it difficult for people to adapt to the social environment in which they lived, and create a kind of subjective distress. In Sibaté, on one hand, both the insane with questionable morals and the mentally ill with abnormal behavior and diseased minds received the same psychiatric treatments. On the other hand, they both also received social treatment that oscillated between mercy and cruelty, tenderness and merciless mockery, respectful admiration and public scorn, from the doctors, those in charge of administering the relevant care, the inhabitants of the town, and visitors.

Foucauldian attempts to show the role of madness in Western society begins with the end of leprosy in Europe and the emergence of madness as a replacement for leprosy at the end of the Middle Ages. Lepers were formerly isolated within the community in special sanatoria. Although the disease of leprosy disappeared, the social constructs that surrounded it remained.

Sibaté’s mental asylums came to resemble “The Ship of Fools” from time to time. Similar to how leprosy was treated during the Middle Ages, those who were believed to be able to “spread madness” and other evils, and thus destroy humanity as it was known, were collected from the streets of many towns and cities in Colombia, and sent to the mental asylum houses. The health system considered it necessary to protect the “healthy/normal” people by removing the “insane/abnormal” from them.

During the Modern era, madness was expelled to the outskirts of the Western world, along with a range of other social deviants. In Sibaté, the enormous houses of asylum were created, and power was exercised in a similar way that it occurred in Europe some decades before.

Many people considered insane who were confined in the four asylums, were not confined because they needed medical attention, but because the power of the state needed to control them. By separating these people from “normal” society, the state sought to define itself. Only by controlling the “abnormal” can the “normal” exist.

The Asylum as the Contemporary Theater of Cruelty

“Society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastiness.”

― Antonin Artaud

The Welfare of the Province of Cundinamarca, to which Sibaté belongs, was created in 1869 within the framework of liberal reforms, with the purpose of responding to the problems of poverty that characterized Colombian society at the end of the 19th century. The objective of this official entity was to create a set of institutions attached to the State that would be in charge of social assistance.

The institution of Psychiatry in Colombia, from 1916 to 1937, marked a new era in which the science and modernization discourses of the eurocentric civilizing project were the central pillars of the society.

The construction of the modern Sibaté’s Neuropsychiatric Hospital was ordered by the Welfare of Cundinamarca in 1921 in order to create an adequate space for the scientific study, care, and treatment of the country’s mentally alienated. It opened its doors for the first time on August 10th, 1937.

Despite the psychiatric standards to be followed, some patients who were branded as “insane” for not fulfilling the

duties assigned by society to their gender, sex, social, or marital status, among other “deviations”, were isolated and subjected to the same procedures that many of the mentally ill had, such as electroconvulsive treatments, insulin treatments, and lobotomies.

The “golden years” of the Julio Manrique hospital lasted more than six decades. In 2002 the Comptroller’s Office of the Department of Cundinamarca began a two year investigation of the hospital and concluded that the hospital was in critical condition. Shortly afterwards, the news and newspapers of the time announced that the hospital ceased to have an operating permit from the Ministry of Health. Among the problems discovered included that water consumed by patients was contaminated. In addition to this, cremations were carried out in the hospital without authorization from the State.

Public control entities and the media also denounced that some patient’s graves, many who were abandoned by their families, were desecrated in order to perform satanic rituals. During those rituals, religious images were burned and graffiti allusive to the devil were painted.

Julio Manrique: A New Reality Show

“The Ship of Fools” appeared as leprosy vanished. It was a literary device that also had a real existence. The Sibaté asylum, now an urban legend, is a center of attraction for ghost-houses, mediums, and all those interested in paranormal matters. It, like “The Ship of Fools”, also had a real existence.

Its real existence is gaining more and more interest from the general public, thanks to a large extent, from the proliferation of entertainment shows that exploit the idea of insanity as a means to express and localize concerns about the darker side of life and fear of the end of the world.

Let’s not forget that madness has been important in tales and fables. In such tales, the insane speaks the truth.

For decades creators and producers of horror shows have exploited the public desire to hear the voice of madness, because “it tells us the truth.” For example, the story of an insane who was “dead” while he was alive, and is now trapped between the walls of the old sanatorium, wants to reveal the anguish that afflicts him, and that does not let him finally rest in peace. This is where reality shows make their triumphal entry. In some of these shows, the madman is portrayed as an uncontrollable dark side of society. Its image throughout history has been associated with the dichotomy between good/bad, light/darkness, stability/disorder. These kinds of shows have the participation of “experts” who try to explain what is, perhaps, inexplicable: the paranormal events observed in the old asylum. These events often seem to try to communicate terrifying moments lived by many of those who were held there: tortures, alleged murders, and suicides.

In “Sigue” of La W Radio, a renowned show from Colombia, the participants of the investigation spoke about supposed paranormal activity in the Neuropsychiatric Hospital of Sibaté. Their investigation was carried out last February 20th, through a live broadcast.

Rafa Taibo, actor, narrator, and director of the transmission, commented: “we have the dream of showing our followers second by second” this investigation. “Really dramatic situations developed” and “it seems to us that it is a unique place for our followers to live the terrifying story… I am looking for tangible proof that there is a paranormal energy in this place. My goal is to explain how such energy is the cause of unknown and uncanny events. If we could get irrefutable proof of the afterlife, we would change the way we understand reality,” he concluded.

According to Taibo and Valencia, an expert in paranormal phenomena, the Sibaté hospital is an ideal place to contact the dead. In an interview with Gloria Guerrero, a former patient at the hospital, Taibo and Valencia learn her story. Gloria shared with them that when she was admitted to the hospital, she saw a nurse dressed in white with a plaid scarf. When greeting her, she did not answer, only raised her head. Gloria went to her companions to find out if they knew the nurse. It was at that moment that her companions told her the horrifying story: They “told me that this nurse died because of a patient who hanged her with that same scarf.”

Given the intrigue generated by the history of the hospital, and the stories about its former inhabitants, told by both locals and foreigners, we will surely continue to be offered more shows that claim to “reveal” the mysteries that insanity and mental illness hold in Sibaté.

My visual narratives

As stated early, the artwork that I am presenting is an attempt to re-create a visual memory of what was experienced by those who lived between the walls of the psychiatric hospital, but also to re-discover the perspective of the town’s inhabitants. In the next gallery you can explore images that relate to the asylum as a space of confinement of both madness and mental illness, where life and death are seen as intertwined states rather than as opposites.