Leros Interiors, 2023

In 1957, the “hospital for psychopaths” opened in a former army barracks on the Greek Island of Leros. From the start it was underfunded, understaffed, and disorganized. An open secret within the Greek psychiatric (and governmental regulatory) community since its inception, the hospital at Leros was conceived as a way to warehouse unwanted and uncared-for patients of psychiatric asylums on the mainland. In the absence of trained medical staff, local people were hired to be overseers and often functioned more as guards than caretakers. In the words G. Rodatis, an islander without medical training who had worked in the hospital before reform:

“My first day in the hospital was very difficult, they took me along with six or seven other colleagues to the hospital’s pathological department to meet some of the mental patients. We encountered on this day a patient in epileptic crisis. As you can understand we were very shocked we saw naked patients and other things that really disappointed us. The personnel were very insufficient compared to the number of patients. I was working overnight amongst 102 patients, all alone. I was like a slave. Imagine being all alone amongst 102 patients having to face crises and things like that. But gradually we got used to it. (Loukakos 2003)”

In the 1980s, the hospital began to be the subject of news articles and photojournalism. One of the earliest documents is The Rejected (Οι Αζήτητο) by Kostis Zios (1982), a 60-minute film set to a dramatic score with voiceovers and interviews with patients. It includes long shots of inmates shackled to trees and bedframes, and slow pans around a massive courtyard filled with seated and wandering figures—some robed, many naked.

On September 10, 1989, the British Observer published a front-page article titled “Europe’s Guilty Secret” which brought international attention to Leros.

In the early 1990’s the asylum was restructured and partially closed. In 2016, a camp for refugees arriving by boat from the Middle East and Africa was built on the hospital grounds, and Leros became an EU “hotspot.” In 2023, a high security detention center for asylum seekers, or Close Controlled Access Center (CCAC), opened on the hillside directly above.

The refugee hotspot camp is now closed. The abandoned hospital buildings remain untended, a site for transient shelter, while the psychiatric hospital itself still functions on a limited, more open and progressive basis in smaller satellite buildings.

In 2023, I traveled to Leros looking for the traces of these overlapping histories— the “ongoing catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” as Walter Benjamin has famously described historical memory— housed in the remains of the 2016 Hotspot camp and the crumbling architecture of the psychiatric asylum.

These images are a counter-memorial, a document that alludes to disparate histories. The pictures point to both the human involvement and the layered structural causes and results. The aftermath portrayed in these spaces is in a continual state of creation, still ongoing.

Though I encountered and spoke with many people moving through these spaces—hospital administrators, refugees, police, local residents, activists—I chose to not picture them, instead seeking out an aesthetic of stillness. A level of disassociation and abstraction to open up a space for contemplation, discussion, ambivalence, and action; a space of in-between, countering the photojournalist’s dynamic, decisive moment.