UNTIL SUNDAY 23/10
THE SHIP. University, 2
Daring, La Nau devotes attention to an area that a priori it is not attractive, that of the disease, more specifically, a type of illness that tends to generate rejection rather than compassion: the mental. I did, in addition to, allocating all its dependencies to the cause. La Nau dels bojos tells us about the unique relationship of the city of Valencia with its “lunatics” and “melancholy”, their "witches", over six hundred years, since the creation of one of the first asylums for the insane in the Western world, until the closure of the Bétera psychiatric hospital, with which the administration admitted the failure of a model that segregated and stigmatized inmates. The more purely historical and scientific part of the exhibition finds color with the artistic representations that illustrate different faces of madness or that, veiled, they evoke it.
The walk begins with a sketch of Sorolla who was preparing the picture about the friar Father Jofré defending a crazy young man from the crowd. You will stumble upon an engraving of Goya which shows an old witch initiating a young woman into the forbidden practices of witchcraft. you know, the donut, that is tempting, seductive and possessed by the devil. The threatening follia was confined, but his kinder face was allowed to participate in the festive transgression, for example, at carnivals or the theater, where they found recognition when they were assigned the role of jesters and men of pleasure, even, in famous comedies like Los Locos de Valencia of Lope de Vega, that appears in the sample. L’Chronicle Team Paint Saint Teresa, who recommended distraction activities against melancholy, Joaquin Collado portrays otherness in the footsteps of Valencia, Dario Villalba the marginalization (distorting the photographic image) i It's here the isolation. Other artists who parade around the show are: Grete Stern with photomontages about dreams (Freud had already emphasized the importance of the subconscious and avant-garde art assimilated some of his precepts) i Joseph Renau on the consumer society (a disease?), Juan Genovés, Moaning, and the photographers José V. Alexander, The Skinny o José Vicente Rodríguez, that managed to capture the watery and lost gaze of madness. Complements the sample an installation of Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González who plays with mirrors recovered from the last psychiatric hospital in Valencia, Father Jofré de Bétera, and confronts them with photographs of the uninhabited and abandoned institution. From July, another installation by the artists made of sculptures representing bathtubs will be installed in the cloister of La Nau, very abundant instruments in psychiatric institutions for their therapeutic function. How we have treated madness over the centuries becomes the subject of study at La Nau. S.M.
