Sobre a ordem do desvio: práticas do espaço e arquitectura em contexto de Hospital Psiquiátrico

Abstract

It is within the course of the experience of the diverse, of the conflict, and in the midst of collective cooperation under domination mechanisms that physical and social spaces are preserved and transformed. Inside that space filled with lines, borders, territorializations and hierarchizations, social life faces a plurality of rules and conventions which correspond to usually implicit values. In the simultaneity in which Power is exercised (open - closed, inside - outside, public - private, whole - divided, allowed - forbidden), the individual is invaded by states that balance between submission and desire for liberty. Due to one's human condition, and because of one's need to acquire significant space and time for free movement, and with an active critical attitude for confrontation of pre-concepts, customs, and habits imprinted early on, one challenges the unresponsive and unpremeditated gentleness arising from those mechanisms of desubjectification. That resistance, often taken as a deviating/ transgressing act is, however, the beginning of a flow of construction processes of differentiated trajectories leading to the (re)discovery and (re)creation. Architecture, as a subject of power-knowledge, which plays a crucial role in the management of predictabilities as well as in the coordination of probabilities, is (or could be), at the same time, a trigger of movements, and a generator of spaces and practices that potentially create this "between" getaway. In this dissertation, direct observation in the context of psychiatric hospital is used to apprehend the experiences in that space built between order and deviation. The small-sized empirical object, from a land confined to restrictive rules becomes a representative of general hypothesis of the comprehension of the practices of those spaces. This space, which is part of the wide range of devices and technical equipment that control the movements of objects and people, encompasses antagonistic qualities that make its definition unstable; thus making the recurring relationships which take place in it dubious. That is to say that, in such control spaces, insubordination is still present, in the same way that oppression is still present in spaces of liberation. Hence, liberty masks authorities behind the image of free organization, just as it is in the shadow of power that subversion is born.