Towering behind the refugee camp on the Greek island of Leros stands the ruin of an abandoned mental asylum. It has been dismantled after scandalous reports of the treatment of inmates in the late 1980s and early1990s. Historical revision of the facilities’ function and purpose reveals a striking symbolism of the recurrent pathologies of society’s impulse to contain and isolate what is conceived as a threat to its orderly function.
In 1994 the photographer Alex Majoli published his first major body of work entitled “Leros”. The monograph documents the final years of the mental asylum on the island. The Goyaesque images depict the gruesome conditions the outcasts were kept in, left largely to themselves with minimal supervision by adequately trained staff and guarded by island inhabitants with no formal training in psychiatric care at all. The cover of the book reads:
"All I know about Leros is in this book. I know that this is another story about crazy people, many crazy people, more than 4,000 at first. I know that 'Leros' means dirty and that they came to this island from all over Greece, chosen from among the worst cases, the ones they'd given up on in the psychiatric hospitals. I know that they were housed in an ex-military base on the island, which had previously been used as a jail for all political prisoners. I know that the islanders began working in the new psychiatric hospital. I know that soon Leros' story began to be associated with its psychiatric hospital and that the world knew nothing about it. I know that inside the asylum you didn't live, you survived.”
