The Plan “Sotiria”
149 faces and 1...
... the spectator’s
Each one of us, a different story, with the sight turned outwards. A mass of faces, uniformly similar, a number of peoples enclosed – outwards.
Stacked over one another, a multitude of faces in a window, so that the visitor can realise the accumulation of patients inside, and also get an idea of the image the people outside have of the persons inside. Moreover, there was also the possibility for the visitor to enter in the hospital, to place his face in the gap between the faces and to feel, even for a moment, that he is part of the mass. In the room there were objects and bags stacked, objects which were already in the hospital, in order, on the one hand, to make the place more realistic, and on the other hand, to give the visitor the sense of confinement and accumulation.
When we study the history of the sanatorium and tuberculosis patients, we encounter an extremely tragic reality, and yet touching.
In the sanatorium, many persons were stacked under miserable conditions, since their number far exceeded the capacity of the hospital.
Indeed, each of them entered with almost non-existent hopes, just like a new candidate to death.
Evidently, from the inside, things were different for each of them. For each person carried along a different personal history. Despite that, for all of them, it was a place of suffering and misfortune. For this reason, the patients themselves describe the Sotiria as a “place of death”, “the entrance of the dead”, “the hell of the living”.
The history of Sotiria, to this date, raises very intense feelings.
