in/audibility (2022)

Posted on September 25, 2023October 2, 2023 by anna papaeti

©Mania Benisi, 2022

The installation “in/audibility” (2022) was created by Anna Papaeti
for the exhibition Εγκλεισμοί at Dromokaiteio Psychiatric Hospital, the first one to be built in Greece in 1887. The exhibition was curated by Dimitris Trikas. The work was set in one of the rooms of Agios Isidoros, closely resembling prison cells; these were intended for poor patients contrary to the more lavish rooms of Daftsio for the wealthy; this class distinction was extended to medical treatment and level of care. The installation combines (hi)stories and testimonies (sound) as well as textual material. Created in the context of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant MUTE, it explores the ethics of listening vis-a-vis in/audibility of “voices” associated with mental illness. The choice of the English term in/audibility entails the notion of audit: we are never mere listeners but potential auditors and disciplinarians of voices that have been historically secluded violently. In the case of people hearing voices, the work wishes to undermine the dominant discourse about what is considered healthy and what is pathological, what can be audible in public and what must be excluded. The work contrapuntally juxtaposes silenced stories in the form testimonies collected through interviews and extracts from texts by members of the collective Hearing Voices – including a poem by Ioulia Apergi – with printed material: a poem and silent voices from grass roots movements and collectives of people who “hear voices” (Hearing Voices, Recovery in the Bin) about the neoliberalization recovery, the method of Dutch psychiatrist Marius Romme about listening to and speaking with the voices, as well as information about the emerging discipline of “mad studies”. It is positioned against the stigmatization and institutionalization of mentally ill people.

Many thanks to Maia Urstad, Nikos Arvanitis and Fanis Maragkos for their generous help, as well as Pavlos Antoniadis,Ioannis Kotsonis, Leandros Kyriacopoulos, Maria Mihalitsianou, Kyriaki Karahaliou, Gene Ray, and Katerina Sergidou for their support.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 101002720).

REFERENCES (audio)
Testimony 1: Interview conducted in July 2022
Testimony 2: Interview conducted in July 2022
Testimony 3: Interview conducted in October 2022
Testimony 4: Extracts taken from Κίνημα Ακούγοντας φωνές [Hearing Voices Movement), “Δίκτυα, Κινήματα, Συγκινήσεις και η «πρώτη ποίησι της ζωής μας»” (Athens: 2021), p.12, https://www.hearingvoices.gr/images/pdf/Diktia_Siginiseis_intervoice2021.pdf; Ioulia Apergi, Χίμαιρες [Chimeres], in Τα τετράδια ψυχιατρικής -“Ακούγoντας φωνές”. Το κίνημα των ανθρώπων που ακούνε φωνές” (Ιανουάριος-Απρίλιος 2016), pp. 80, 81.

AUDIO