Screening and Discussion of ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ

We are working with the collective Other Ways to Care for a screening of the short film ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ and a discussion with director Sol Prada

ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ (approx. running time, 22 minuets) is part of the investigation of the director Sol Prado, activist in psycho-social disability and ex-irregular migrant, focused on the case of the island of Leros, Greece. This project formulates a study, which mixes theoretical references with videogames techniques, applications to calm the anxiety and distress and videos of ASMR (Autonomous meridian sensory response), a typology of distributed online contents that stimulates emotional dependence when creating audiovisual stimuli. This short film investigates how desires production is a new way of social regulation, which uses images (among other stimuli) to achieve controlled sedation, subject to the mirages of happiness which are related directly to the merchandized consumption of experiences.

These reading groups are free to attend and open to all. All registered attendees will be sent a link to join us on Zoom before the event.

Abstract:

The short documentary ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ [Enclosed] takes us to the Greek island of Leros, a museum of lockdown before the era of lockdown.

Occupied by Italians between the First and Second World Wars, the island became a prison for political detainees during the Greek military dictatorship. In the 1970s, the island was re-functionalized as a psychiatric mental hospital. At present -a symptom of its time- it houses a refugee camp, set as a kind of “Chinese box” in a tourist destination of sun and sand.

The origin of the project can be found in the diary that the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari wrote during his stay on the island in 1989. In it, he denounced the conditions of confinement of psychiatric patients; a reflection of the treatment that European society accords to mad people. The short film is a study based on the director’s personal experience, in which she mixes theoretical references with video games, anxiety calming apps and ASMR videos; artefacts designed for the evasion and dissociation of personal discomfort from the social causes that produce it.

The piece silently and elegantly addresses the architecture of the lockdown, the dead time and the uncertain future. Like a kind of cursed luck, ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ reveals and deciphers through Leros the sensations that would spread to the common sense of the world population during the 2020 pandemic.

Author biography:

Sol Prado is an artist, film director and textile designer. She grew up in Carapachay, Buenos Aires and has resided in Barcelona since 2015, where she arrived to study the MACBA Independent Studies Program and established herself as a designer for the Gratacós textile company. Her artwork addresses madness and psychosocial diversity; faith and religion – which she abandoned after twenty after an evangelical education -; exile and migration. With the gaze of an archivist, her work tends to seek unseen identities, lives that are not counted. Currently, she collaborates with the International Errorista and is part of the board of directors of ActivaMent, a self-managed group of people with psycho-social diversity.

ΚΛΕΙΣΑΜΕ [Enclosed], her debut as a director, premiered as the opening performance of the Loop Festival and has been screened at Olhar do Cinema (Curitiba), ZINEBI (Bilbao) and the Malaga Festival, among others.

Other Ways to Care is a collective that emerged around the will to imagine care alternatives drawn out of activist and collective practices that confront, discuss and move beyond the neoliberal project, or in other words the increasing privatisation and individualisation of mental health care. We draw inspiration from minor psycho-political histories and from politically and socially situated practices of care which operate beyond the medical model and technological models of health and distress.

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