Prompted by the overhearing of many a conversation about “community”, I set out to say my own piece about this subject. I wanted to say something small, simple and exciting, because I believe these are valuable aspects of a livable, welcoming social group. Perhaps, though, the purpose of community is not to find the ideal social setting. Monks, monasteries, and life-long spiritual and/or philosophical commitments to living in common and believing in common dominated my brainstorming stage. I found images of monks, both eastern and western, collected rules and rites that organized their lives, and then I visited the library. I lingered in the sections at the library dedicated to religion, social environments and communities in society (urban, rural, etc.) The most provocative books that I found were about alternative lifestyles and communes from the 60’s and 70’s, a handful of books by Henri Nouwen, and the book “Ghetto”, by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin.
The books describing the desert, ascetic communities from the 60’s and 70’s listed PhD’s, college dropouts, lawyers, singles, families, pot smokers, America protestors, experimenters with religion, and others who found one another, found a piece of land or an old grocery store, or any place at all that they could call “home”. These people had arrived at a place of religious or philosophical conviction and they could no longer live privately or capitally. They would, from their enlightenment forward, live in common with others. Many things brought these people together, many factors affected their common success or failure. Most importantly, they held their own mental faculties as they decided to experiment with their old lives and take on new ones. These were brilliant, bold decisions that, in making, had to have caused great hurt to some, but lavished love on others. (http://americanhistory.si.edu/lisalaw/6.htm)Henri Nouwen dominated the second stack of books that I found. He was a former priest and professor of religion at Harvard University Divinity School, Yale University Divinity School, and the University of Notre Dame. For several months during the 1970s, Henri Nouwen lived and worked with Trappist monks in the Abbey of the Genesee, and in the early 1980s he lived with the poor in Peru. In 1985 he was called to join L’Arche in Trosly, France, the first of over 100 communities founded by Jean Vanier where people with developmental disabilities live with assistants. A year later Nouwen came to make his home at L’Arche Daybreak near Toronto, Canada. He died suddenly on September 21st, 1996.
Henri’s life and work gave new direction to my research. His was the first quirky hint of joining a great, complex mind dedicated to the formation of the individual within a community, while sharing in common his life and space with those who know no other way than to “do life together.”
In my limited experience with developmentally disabled people in the USA; are they not separated from the big group and given a small group to interact with from a very early age? In my grade school they were placed in a “special” classroom, with a special teacher, some with their personal aide. This small group and one-on-one interaction was something foreign to me, but special attention is always available for special children. If these kids stayed in our school district, then they were likely to be in class with the same 5-10 kids for 12 straight years. Special, deep, confiding relationships developed for them over time that the rest of us knew nothing about. We changed teachers, grades, classrooms, hallways, boyfriends / girlfriends, etc.
Henri Nouwen, gave up his high-profile Ivy League life to invest in and also to receive the special relationship for which he knew he was designed, but never experienced in common life with people who required change, new stimuli, and the organic push and pull of relationships. Most importantly, the community at L’Arche Daybreak, and the other L’Arch communities in the world do not have the mental faculties to live alone. They are given a community in which to share their lives. It is safe and better for them there. Henri Nouwen needed this community as much as this community needed him. They gave themselves to one another, the brilliant and the simple sharing life in common.
The last book I found, and the one that catalyzed my research is the book “Ghetto”. The photographers responsible for this book wanted to describe worlds that felt under explained by current journalism. For two years they traveled, investigated, and photographed the people living in these places or situations. The people and circumstances they found at Rene Vallejo Psychiatric Hospital in Cuba are the focus of my final project. The photographers originally wanted access to a psychiatric hospital made infamous by a battle between Amnesty International and Fidel Castro’s policy on how to get rid of the people you don’t like. They were denied access and redirected to Rene Vallejo, an under-the radar, less antagonistic hospital, but a hospital of psychiatric care nonetheless. Still, the doctors at this hospital closed doors in the photographers faces, and claimed certain wings of the hospital were off-limits. Despite these few roadblocks, photographers Adam Bloomberg and Oliver Chanarin had access to an ample number of patients at the hospital. They interviewed, befriended, and photographed the patients, who, I should add, are being slowly reintegrated into public life after 20-30 years of living at Rene Vallejo. Bloomberg and Chanarin found those men and women to be full of life, testing romance, and giving rough, beautiful explanations of “why” they are hospitalized.Initially, the photographs and portraits of the patients held my attention. I started to sketch them one at a time while reading more about their stories. As my catalogue of sketches grew, so did my research on Cuba, Castro, political prisoners in communist governments, human rights, and the plight of Rene Vallejo’s patients and doctors.
As mentioned above, the photographers’ work at Rene Vallejo Psychiatric Hospital was restricted. I was so excited by the picture portraits, and the way that hospitalizing these individuals worked into my scheme of putting helpless people in communities while letting the rest of the world roam alone and free. But, I was unable to stop here and complete my thoughts. It was impossible to ignore the fact that Broomberg and Chanarin were led around the hospital by a chaperone who feared that the photographers would use the shortcomings of his hospital as political ammunition against the Cuban government. Patients without shoes were not to be photographed — unless another patient with a pair donated them. (There was plenty of shoe swapping.) Every image was examined and approved by the hospital director. Much was out of bounds — like the electro-shock therapy room, which patients reported was in regular use and patients’ dormitories, where privacy was non-existent. Also unacceptable was any mention of the Cuban law of peligrosidad (dangerousness). This law is often used to intern homosexuals and other citizens judged to be “in manifest contradiction with the norms of socialist morality.” There were details Broomberg and Chanarin couldn’t photograph — things they heard but could not capture on film.
At this point, I had unresolved thoughts and problems with my subject. I had the 15 portraits I reproduced in sketch form. I had googled “peligrosidad” a jillion times. I had researched Amnesty International, the Indianapolis Public Library, and the rest of the Internet for something current about Cuba or her psychiatric hospitals. Nothing existed that wasn’t 3-5 years old. Most of my findings were 10-20 years old, or invitations to vacation in Cuba. And I still thought something could be said about the mental state of those found living “in community.”
This is what I am ready to say. In these “communities,” one type of person exists: he/she who has reached a state of mind or faith that requires him/her to leave a solitary life and commit to a common one. In this commitment, whether by thought or deed, or regular medication, the individual is left behind. The individual will be forgotten, refined or recreated in the hands of community.
I am opposed to hospitalizing people because they are gay or have political views contrary to my own. That is a horrible thing to do. However, for these men and women in Cuba who only know life at Rene Vallejo, I have chosen to represent them, using the sketches I made, with the ink prints I collaged over them, and worked back into them with other dry materials. I do not think it is relevant to imagine how they were before Rene Vallejo, or how they might be better off/worse off in other situations. As I have found them, in Broomberg’s and Chanarin’s portraits, they will be kept together in a series and hung in a large frame similar to the picture
I found of the box that daily medication is distributed from at Rene Vallejo. One individual, when asked why he is a resident at Rene Vallejo, answered, “I am here for 1 blue pill and 2 white ones.” I will build this box and paint a washed-out hint of Cuba’s flag on the frame. Each of the portraits will be housed in its own, numbered compartment, separate but adjacent to the others. This is how they lived at Rene Vallejo when I discovered them
