“Esta es mi nave de los locosde la locura es el espejo.Al mirar el retrato oscurotodos se van reconociendo.Y al contemplarse todos sabenque ni somos ni fuimos cuerdos,y que no debemos tomarnospor eso que nunca seremos.No hay un hombre sin una grieta,y nadie puede pretenderlo;nadie está exento de locura,nadie vive del todo cuerdo.”“Stultifera navis” (1494), Sebastian Brant
The artworks in this exhibition are part of a larger body of work, begun in 2017, dedicated to exploring the memory of the last Psychiatric Hospital in Valencia, the former Padre Jofré Hospital of Bétera. The project explores the particular history of this facility in order to reflect on the figure of the asylum as a mirror of society, while at the same time highlighting its failure as a structure of isolation.
The title of this installation, which will be presented from next July in the Senate space, refers to the symbolic figure of the Ship of Fools. Emerging in the Renaissance, this figure determines the wandering existence of madmen or fools, who were embarked on these ships to be expelled from the cities. On a symbolic level, the ship can signify the pilgrimage of madness in search of reason and its purification, through the water on which they sail.
The artwork is made up of a series of sculptural pieces based on one of the elements that is repeated and has a very significant presence in every psychiatric institution: the bathtubs. The bathtubs fulfilled an important therapeutic and normative function in the past, but, at the same time, like all traces, they fulfil a testimonial function in the present and have great symbolic potential. On the one hand, its emptiness recalls and points to the absent bodies, and on the other, it functions as a remnant and symbol of a shipwreck, that of this Ship of Fools, which represents the failure of the madhouse system and the society that created it.
