The name of the island of Leros is often employed as shorthand for the psychiatric institute which has been operating there since 1958. To a considerable extent, this ‘Leros’ subsists in our collective unconscious as a guilty secret. Over and above the psychiatric institution, this is due to an ongoing traumatic history of incarceration and exclusion which begins with the prewar Italian military garrison, includes the creation of the Royal Technical Schools which operated as places of reformation and catechism for young resistance fighters in the post-civil war years, up to the use of the same buildings as places of exile and imprisonment under the Junta. This photographic series attempts to speak of Leros through and beyond the psychiatric institute. As Neni Panourgia has put it, “I am speaking of a specific node which I call ‘Foucault’s node’, the node of violent and enforced movements which bear the still oozing stigmata of barracks, reformatories, political prisons, camps of exile, psychiatric institutions, of emigration and of refugees. I speak of Leros”.
