DSM
(provisional title)

Mental Health Department
Approximately thirty years ago, as a result of the enforcement of the “Psychiatric Reform Law”, better known as the “Basaglia Law”, the Italian madhouses were definitively closed down.
The instruments used in chirurgical operations at such mental health centers, constitute the main object of each section of the exhibition. These instruments, mostly from the sixties, were found by the artist at the operation rooms of the few institutions that have been kept closed and untouched ever since.
Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) of the chirurgical instruments are projected over the walls of the spyral structure of the “Artifacts” installation -built as a container of organs-. At it’s center, a human brain in formaldehide stands lit in the dark.
The series of photographs, shot at the desolate spaces of the old mental health institutions, evoke the memory of its former occupants; while the X rays of the instruments, mounted on light boxes, give birth to the process of expansion of memory.
The sound installation blends with the resonance of the wind while passing through the orifices of an old medieval ruin, and the caw of birds that nest in this hollow building.
These modern medical techniches applied to steady objects, transported to the artistic field, establish a counterpoint dialogue with the pencil drawings of Eva Gerd, transforming the instruments in post-organic bodies in continuous evolution.
Each one of the rescued objects, coated, sutured and embalmed rest in a larval state, lying on black satin pillows. With such burial in full sight, the ritual of the metamorphosis of the objects comes to its conclusion, but also the artists’ one, who -incorporated to their own work-, participate in the Platonic theory of the ideas and the doctrine of the shapes, where existence is divided in two spheres: the “intelligible” of the perfect ideas and shapes, eternal and undivisible; and the “sensible”, where the concrete and known objects belong.

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