Remember Me?

In this work, patients of a psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires look themselves in the eye

Many people are deposited by their families into Borda Psychiatric Hospital in Buenos Aires, facing abandonment and condemnation from society. I invited the mad ones to come into a shabby shed in the hospital gardens, away from the gaze of doctors and security guards. I asked these men to sit down and literally look at themselves in the mirrored glass I had glued on to my camera lens.

Of them, General Perón’s reincarnation drove me from love to despair. I am told that another one had killed his mother. This one keeps repeating that his testicles were punctured and the rest of his organs removed. My favourite is a delirious kid living in the body of a 53-year-old man, one who wears the exact same clothes every day. Another one had been Jesus for a few years. Within them might be an architect, a lawyer or an agoraphobe. There could also be someone who cut his mother’s head off and cooked it in the oven.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan proposes that the ‘mirror stage’ constitutes a fundamental experience of identification in which the child conquers the image of his or her own body and helps to put an end to the psychic experience known as the fantasy of the fragmented body. It is through this narcissistic passage known as the ‘mirror stage’ that the child is able to identify with others.

The following series presents forgotten men looking at themselves.

–Text by Flavia Schuster

Buenos AiresDelhi Photo FestivalFlavia Schuster