WORLD MUST BE BURIED ALIVE, 2022-23
As the world seemed to be only machinery I thought it might be a reflection we might return to our former life private too much white house I think half the world must be buried alive. It really is not the child’s hospital.
Amy Sarjeant, Aradale inpatient, 1919.
In the 1990s, Jeff Kennett’s Liberal government began closing mental health institutions in Victoria; by 2005, all had been closed. J Ward and Aradale were two of those institutions to have been decommissioned in the initial thrusts of these closures.
J Ward and Aradale existed for 130 years as mental health institutions; terms such as ‘lunatic’ and ‘insane’ were variously appended to the official titles of these institutions over the span of their operation. The relatively recent generic term ‘mental health’ cloaks and smooths - like colonialism - its own history and trajectory. Unable to utter its own history, the term presents its own ‘disorder’ as silence.
Photography abetted the institution - both penal and mental - to catalogue, describe and systemise its occupants. Half the World Must Be Buried Alive does not seek to systemise or catalogue, but to depict a certain pre-history whose mechanisms and procedures may now seem - at first glance - obsolete, yet equally informed contemporary mental health practices.
Via patient letters, instruments, admission photographs, psychopharmacological molecular models, and the spaces and environs of the institutions themselves, Half the World Must Be Buried Alive is a fragmentary portrait from a vast collective of forget.
These works were made in Ararat/Tallarambooroo and Melbourne/Naarm.
