| Art can heal people, feels Argentine asylum |
BUENOS AIRES Hundreds of patients at Argentina’s biggest mental hospital are turning fine arts training into real ability as painters, actors and musicians, and getting a fuller sense of self along the way.
“Art really can be a tool for change in society. And you can see its effects, because art can heal people,” said Mirtha Otazua, a psychologist and coordinator of an acting workshop at Jose Tiburcio Borda Mental Hospital.
The facility in Buenos Aires is home to 700 inpatients, all male, on a sprawling and gritty 19-hectare campus where efforts are afoot to change a system that has long kept such patients cut off from both the world and their own potential.
Nobody is a bigger believer in the programme’s prospects for changing lives than its director, Alberto Sava.
“The creative process, in and of itself, has some major positive effects,” Sava said.
“But our workshops are also turning out musicians and artists of quality” performing or showing in theaters, galleries, festivals and schools outside Borda, he said.
Sava sports a white beard and exudes a gentle demeanor despite being faced with crowding and facilities that have likely not been upgraded since the hospital opened in 1865.
Sava’s involvement in art dates back to the 1980s, when there was an effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to shut down asylums in the hope that patients would improve if they were better integrated in society at large.
As mental health care settled back on a more traditional course, Sava struck on the idea that fine arts could provide patients with a therapeutic focus.
Now, in addition to serving as a social psychologist, Sava is in charge of acting and mime as the founder of the Borda Artists Front, a radical name for a simple idea.
“There are so many inpatients here with artistic potential. You can see it in the people out on the terrace playing guitar, in the quality of painting and graffiti on the walls and in the poetry they actually sell in the hallways,” Sava said in his tiny, cluttered office at the hospital.
He coordinates 13 workshops in theater, mime, literature, circus, music, painting and sculpture that bring together inpatients, outpatients, hospital staff, medical students and neighbours of the facility.
Agencies
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