Arts-based practices of slow memory around mental suffering: An analysis of the Argentinian collaborative film project Los fuegos internos (2019)

Abstract

This article studies how arts-based practices contribute to reconfiguring collective memory around mental suffering in Latin America, focusing on the Argentinian collaborative film Los fuegos internos as an exemplary case of slow memory work. We argue that the film foregrounds memories and stories often marginalized or dismissed, intervening in social exclusions through which certain lives are rendered less grievable and less visible in collective memory. As a collaborative creation, Los fuegos internos integrates participants with lived experience of psychiatric hospitalization as protagonists, artists, and co-producers. In doing so, it affirms their role as creators of collective memory, enabling them to exercise agency in representing personal stories and memories. Our analysis highlights how the film transforms deeply individual experiences into shared artistic expressions (e.g. poetry and dance) that others can witness. In this way, Los fuegos internos exemplifies how arts-based practices can gradually reshape collective memory.

Introduction

“Yo puedo describirte la guerra. Guerra, sí, sin armas. Sólo la palabra reprimida. Las voces son las granadas, la contención los tanques, las pastillas las balas. [. . .] Yo puedo contarte mi guerra que nace de la impotencia, cuando la puerta se cierra.”

(El Cisne del Arte, 2019)

“I can describe the war to you. War, yes, without weapons. Only suppressed words. The voices are the grenades. The restraints, the tanks. The pills, the bullets. [. . .] I can tell you my war, born from impotence, when the door closes.”

(El Cisne del Arte, 2019)

In the opening scene of Los fuegos internos (“Inner Fires,” 2019) Daniel, Argentinian writer and poet diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 14, recounts his experiences of mental suffering during hospitalization, which he interprets and frames in terms of war. Highlighting the violent dimensions of psychiatric hospitalization, this war-related imagery facilitates the visibilization of memories of violence that otherwise would not be recognized as such. The collaborative film project Los fuegos internos is the result of a 9-year process of co-creation by participants of the Argentinian artistic collective El Cisne del Arte. Part of the Community Mental Health Center connected with the psychiatric institution Dr. Alejandro Korn in La Plata, El Cisne del Arte fosters a communitarian space where out-patients of the hospital (most of them having experienced prolonged periods of hospitalization) can strengthen their artistic skills and social connections. Among the collaborative arts-based productions of this collective is Los fuegos internos. The film is based on the testimonies of three friends, Jorge, Miguel, and Daniel, who became close friends in the hospital, and who supported each other through difficult moments of mental suffering during and after hospitalization.

In the present article, we will study Los fuegos internos through the lens of slow memory. The collaborative film project illustrates the slow memory work emerging in Latin America through arts-based practices that engage with experiences of mental suffering. These arts-based practices, we argue, contribute to a collective memory-making process in which the stories of people affected by mental suffering are being listened to, remembered, shared, and valued. Our analysis is informed by interviews Marileen La Haije conducted with Laura Lago, artistic coordinator of El Cisne del Arte, who was part of the collaborative film project Los fuegos internos, and other key actors in the field: artists, activists, healthcare workers, experienced experts, students, and scholars engaged with mental health activism in Argentina. We consider them to be memory actors (Jelin, 2012: 50) who, through diverse arts-based practices, seek to visibilize people who experience mental suffering as subjects of memory. The interview analysis will be combined with an in-depth cinematographic analysis of Los fuegos internos, featuring a selection of scenes from the movie in which memory-making is central.

In the first section, we conceptualize and contextualize the lens of slow memory that we adopt in this article. In the second section, we approach the collaborative film project Los fuegos internos as a significant example of slow memory work through arts-based practices with people who went through psychiatric hospitalization.

Marginalized memories

The lens of slow memory that we adopt in this article is based on the notion of memory work, introduced by the Argentinian social scientist Elizabeth Jelin (2012). Jelin focuses particularly on the memory work in the aftermath of the Argentinian dictatorship (1976–1983). A key reference in this context is the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo fighting for Truth, Justice, and Memory for the victims of enforced disappearance and other human rights violations during the dictatorship. Acknowledging the unprecedented memory work of the mothers and other social actors in response to the dictatorial past, Jelin invites memory studies scholars to extend the notion of memory work toward other, present-day practices of memory and activism.

Responding to Elizabeth Jelin’s invitation, Latin American cultural studies scholars (e.g. Allier Montaño and Granada-Cardona, 2023; Diéguez, 2021; Forchieri, 2024; Longoni and Bruzzone, 2008; Mandolessi, 2020; Richard, 2000; Sosa, 2021) convincingly expand the research scope of the memory studies field by including contemporary cultural-artistic responses to feminicide, forced disappearance, and other current injustices on its agenda. Our article builds on this body of scholarship aimed at studying present-day practices of memory and activism in Latin America. At the same time, we seek to expand their perspectives in a new direction by focusing on a form of memory work that has so far not been addressed in this field: arts-based memory work engaging with people who experience mental suffering. This new direction is informed by the concept of slow memory which proposes a shift in memory studies scholarship from concrete events (e.g. genocide and conflict) toward “eventless,” slow-moving transformations which are also part of social remembering (Wüstenberg, 2023), including slow-moving, transformative practices of care.

Jelin (2012) shows the importance of studying the diverse social actors who intervene in the construction of memories, highlighting, as well, that these memories are oftentimes the object of disputes, conflicts, and struggles (p. 36). The conflictive nature of memory work is particularly evident in the case of the memories of people who experience mental suffering. In fact, stories and memories by people with lived experiences of mental suffering are oftentimes received with disbelief or suspicion (e.g. “you do not remember well” and “you exaggerate”), becoming the object of stigmatization and forgetting in society. The Uruguayan psychologists Walter Phillipps-Treby and Leonora Silva demonstrate the connection between stigmatization and forgetting of those who experience mental suffering through a comparison with the memories of the victims of the dictatorship in Uruguay (1973–1985). The conditions of confinement of the political prisoners during the dictatorship are similar to those of the in-patients of the psychiatric hospital Vilardebó (Montevideo) today, according to Phillipps-Treby and Silva (2009: 290) (Phillipps-Treby was a political prisoner himself at the time). In fact, human rights organizations have extensively documented abusive practices in mental hospitals in Latin America, including physical restraint, prolonged isolation, and the coercive use of medication (e.g. Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, 2008; Comisión Provincial por la Memoria, 2004–present; Comité para la Prevención de la Tortura, 2022; Mecanismo Nacional de Prevención de la Tortura, 2015–present).

During one of their Master’s courses, which included a visit to the Vilardebó hospital, Walter Phillipps-Treby and Leonora Silva noticed that their psychology students were more moved when they saw old photographs of victims of the Uruguayan dictatorship, than when they came to know the present-day “cells” in the hospital: “Sensitivity is more sensitive when it concerns our own group,” they observed (Phillipps-Treby and Silva, 2009: 282, our translation). This classroom experience is telling, according to Phillipps-Treby and Silva (2009), in the sense that it demonstrates our collective ignorance and desmemorias (or forgetting) in relation to those who are hospitalized in psychiatric institutions, “the other humans” (p. 338, our translation). Due to persistent stigmas related to mental suffering, they argue, “the dark and silent death” (2009: 316, our translation) in psychiatric institutions does not feature in public memory discourses, in contrast to those who died in political prisons.

The reflections by Phillipps-Treby and Silva resonate with Judith Butler’s (2006) ideas about the “differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not” (p. 16). Butler (2006) explains that this differential allocation of grievability produces and maintains certain “exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a grievable death?” (p. 16). Although Butler does not refer to people experiencing mental suffering in this context, it is clear that they would belong to the group of subjects who must not be grieved. In this sense, following the biopolitical framework adopted by Butler, one can discern a continuity of repression exercised by the state and its institutions, as a means of organizing and controlling lives that are already vulnerable and precarious. ¹

Susanne Knittel’s work provides a critical examination of the social norms that determine which lives are deemed grievable and worth remembering. Through her analysis of the Nazi euthanasia program at Grafeneck, she shows how the victims of this violence were largely excluded from Holocaust memory, reflecting “society’s deep and persistent ambivalence toward disability and mental illness” (Knittel, 2014: 26). She emphasizes that people with disabilities and mental health conditions “were not –and, to a great extent, are not—seen as agents of memory” (Knittel, 2014: 45), a perspective that underscores the historical exclusion of certain lives from collective memory. Knittel (2014) further shows how this memory is “haunted by the present,” noting that cultural prejudice and stigmatization of disability persist, and that the “steadfast belief held by many that disability must be ‘cured’ rather than accommodated tacitly affirms eugenicist notions that a disabled life is ‘not worth living’” (pp. 45–46). Highlighting the need to engage seriously with these and other marginalized memories, Knittel (2014) invites memory studies scholars to open up the field, calling for a reevaluation of the sources and perspectives to be considered, and encouraging dialogue with disability studies and other critical perspectives that interrogate which lives are recognized as “worth living” and worth remembering (p. 71).

Responding to Knittel’s invitation, we engage in this article with arts-based practices that foreground the lived experiences of people affected by mental suffering, not only acknowledging them as subjects of memory but also affirming their role as creators of collective memory. In what follows, we contextualize the Argentinian film project Los fuegos internos as part of a larger repertoire of arts-based practices that seek to counter stigmatization and forgetting of those who experience mental suffering.

Arts-based memory work

In recent decades, an increasing number of arts-based practices in Latin America have sought to promote the rights and social recognition of people affected by mental suffering. These initiatives are diverse, ranging from literary and cinematographic productions to mural arts, photographic documentation, textile creations, arts-based games, interactive theater, and street performances, and take place both within and beyond mental health care institutions. This proliferation has drawn growing attention from scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and psychology, who emphasize their critical role in challenging stigma and reimagining mental health care (Baroni, 2019; Bonnin, 2018; Castillo Parada, 2021; Cea Madrid, 2019; Erro, 2021; Ferigato et al., 2011; Gómez and Sava, 2020).

Building on this growing scholarship on arts-based practices of mental health activism in Latin America, we focus on the slow memory work fostered by these practices, particularly through an analysis of the Argentinian film project Los fuegos internos. These practices, we argue, urge us to critically reflect on the memories and desmemorias that are produced in society: Which experiences do we consider to be memorable, and which ones we tend to forget? Whose memories do we value, and which ones we do not? Whose stories or testimonies do we believe, and which ones do we disqualify? We theorize these practices as forms of slow memory work in the sense that, grounded in the lived experiences of those affected by mental suffering, they draw attention to the gradual and often invisible processes of stigmatization, social exclusion and psychiatric violence, as well as the slow-moving practices of care, solidarity, and everyday resistance. Moreover, they articulate an ethical-political commitment to confronting stigma, fostering social recognition, and gradually reshaping collective memory.

The slow memory work by the Frente de Artistas del Borda (or FAB) is pioneering: an Argentinian artistic collective active since 1984 in the psychiatric institution José Tiburcio Borda (El Borda in popular speech) in Buenos Aires, but operating independently from this institution. In 2017, for example, FAB curated a public exhibition Sin reserva in El Olimpo, a former clandestine detention center where mass torture and extermination took place during the Argentinian dictatorship. Today, the site functions as a commemorative space dedicated to the promotion of human rights. The 2017 exhibition featured a performance in which FAB artists showed the well-known photographs of victims of enforced disappearance during the dictatorship in juxtaposition with the lesser-known photographs of women and men who recently died in Argentinian psychiatric institutions. Through this juxtaposition the artists suggest an articulation between the injustices in the dictatorial past and the injustices that continue to occur in psychiatric institutions today, including physical restraint, prolonged isolation, and the coercive use of medication which have been extensively documented by Argentinian human rights organizations (e.g. Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales, 2008; Comisión Provincial por la Memoria, 2004–present). Moreover, the photographic performance by the FAB artists highlights the unequal distribution of visibility between different kinds of memories. Unlike the victims of the dictatorship, people who died in psychiatric institutions rarely feature in public memory discourses, which, if we follow Phillipps-Treby’s and Silva’s (2009) argument, has to do with the persistent stigmas related to mental suffering.

Slow memory work also emerges through small-scale, everyday practices. At the Tobar García children’s hospital for mental health in Buenos Aires, for example, arts-based games serve as a means of fostering creative expression and memory among young people affected by mental suffering. For the children, many of them facing situations of extreme social vulnerability (e.g. poverty and violence), hospitalization oftentimes represents a difficult period marked by imposed waiting. Within this difficult setting, the recreation team of the Tobar García Hospital proposes playful practices that mobilize the creative capacities of the children who go through hospitalization; for example, fantasy narrative role-playing games inspired by Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). As part of narrative role-playing games performed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the children collectively created fantasy stories featuring wizards, princes and other characters who travel across magical continents, fight zombies, and find love. Many of the children who participated in the storytelling practices did not know how to read or write, due to the situations of extreme social vulnerability they face. Still, they were able to generate memorable stories, making use of oral and visual languages. They created both past-oriented narratives, reflecting on memories of orphanhood and lost family ties, and future-oriented narratives, envisioning future life projects and friendships (Barugel and La Haije, 2024: 88). These narrative games exemplify slow memory work, allowing children to transform passive waiting into a collaborative and imaginative engagement with storytelling and memory.

In what remains of this article, we will focus on slow memory work through collaborative filmmaking in Los fuegos internos. Making use of the visual and auditory possibilities of the medium of the film, the participants of this project seek to make memory work for people with lived experiences of mental suffering.

From memory to fiction: Los fuegos internos

El Cisne del Arte is part of the Community Mental Health Center, which offers a series of rehabilitation workshops (e.g. carpentry and cooking) for outpatients of the psychiatric institution Dr. Alejandro Korn. Based on the various interests and objectives of the participants, the workshops facilitated by El Cisne del Arte cover a diverse range of arts-based practices, including photography, poetry, radio, film, and plastic arts. In La Haije’s interview with Laura Lago, who coordinates these workshops, she observes that the participants oftentimes spontaneously share personal memories and stories of mental suffering and hospitalization. Their stories and memories, she explains, are treated in El Cisne del Arte as artistic materials:

We are not going to listen to those stories as if we were psychologists, or as if we were psychiatrists or nurses, right? We are still in the setting of an artistic workshop, acknowledging that, historically, artists [. . .] have processed their suffering, their life through artistic materials. (Lago, 2022, personal interview, our translation)

In 2010, Jorge approached Laura and the other participants of El Cisne del Arte with the proposal to artistically document, through filmmaking, the friendship between him, Daniel, and Miguel, their experiences in the hospital, and the transition phase after hospitalization. Dealing with severe mental health conditions, including schizophrenia and long-term depression, the three of them have been hospitalized in the psychiatric institution Dr. Alejandro Korn during prolonged periods of time, during which they became close friends. Their personal stories and memories of mental suffering, hospitalization, friendship, and love would become the key artistic materials during a 9-year process of cinematographic co-creation. ²

In the interview, Laura observes that this creative process implied a passage from memory to fiction. Treating painful memories of lived experiences of mental suffering as artistic materials, as fiction, she explains, can be “alleviating” in a sense (2022, personal interview, our translation). Humor and laughing together played a vital role:

So we were talking about very dense issues. [The participants] were recounting a lot of suffering, a lot of pain, but, at the same time, they were making jokes, because we were writing a film. [. . .] They were laughing about the situations which they could process through humor: about how crazy they were, about the hallucinations they had, very dense issues. (Lago, 2022, personal interview, our translation)

Not all personal memories and stories they addressed during the creative process could be processed through humor. Some episodes of their lives featuring critical moments of mental suffering were so overwhelming for the participants that they decided to work with a supporting actor performing the corresponding scenes. “Under no circumstances should the movie cause more suffering,” Laura explains (2022, personal interview, our translation). The workshop participants themselves, those with lived experiences of mental suffering, were the ones who decided on how to navigate between humor and pain, memory and fiction during this creative process. ³

The result, as Alan Robinson (2020) accurately observes, is a docu-fiction of three life stories. The first part of Los fuegos internos focuses on the personal experiences of the three protagonists leading to and during hospitalization, and includes scenes featuring critical moments of mental suffering. The second part centers on their lives after hospitalization, during which they continue to support each other through difficult times. In what follows, we will analyze a selection of scenes from the movie in which memory-making is central, focusing on visual and auditory features of the filmic narration.

Memory activism

The settings selected for Los fuegos internos are key to understand the situatedness of the memory work that it generates. In the second scene, we see and hear seagulls flying alongside the water and across the sunny beach. The camera then shows Jorge (fictionalized as Germán in the movie) ⁴ in profile, looking at the water, and Miguel and Daniel a couple of meters away from him, bordering the coastline, followed by a long shot in which we see the three of them together, united. This scene is significant, not only because it introduces the main characters of the movie, but also because of its setting: the Río de La Plata, located in the surroundings of the city of La Plata, where the three characters live after hospitalization. ⁵

For the Argentinian viewer, the Río de La Plata bears significant meaning in relation to the recent past of the dictatorship, when victims of the military regime were “disappeared” in the river or the ocean—some of their bodies would later reappear at the coastline of the Río de La Plata. Today, the river is not only a physical bearer of these memories of injustices; it has also become a site for memory activism against forgetting. Among the arts-based practices of memory performed at the Río de La Plata feature the artistic works that are part of the Parque de la Memoria (“Park of Memory”) in the City of Buenos Aires, created in 1998 with the aim to make current and future generations aware of the horrors that took place during the dictatorship.

Los fuegos internos is part of this ever-expanding body of memory work at the riverside. According to our perspective, by choosing the Río de La Plata as a central setting for the filmic narration, the film advances memory activism on mental suffering. It seeks to visibilize the memories and stories of people with lived experiences of mental suffering who went through hospitalization; stories that, as I explained before, rarely feature in public memory discourses. In line with this argument, Alberto Sava, founding member of the FAB collective, interprets experiences of hospitalization in closed psychiatric institutions in terms of disappearance: “Those who live in the asylum (manicomio) are our other disappeared because ‘they do not exist’” (qtd. in Yaccar, 2017, our translation). Sava’s allusions to the well-known memories of the disappeared during the dictatorship can be understood as a strategy to visibilize people affected by psychiatric hospitalization as subjects of memory, who otherwise would not be recognized as such.

Los fuegos internos advances a similar strategy (without referring explicitly to the memories of the victims of enforced disappearance). By situating stories and memories of mental suffering and hospitalization at a well-known site for memory activism, the Río de La Plata, the movie seeks to inscribe these stories within a cultural repertoire of socially recognized memories of violence. At the same time, Los fuegos internos shows the different layers of memories at the riverside where, over the years and decades, different but intersecting memories of violence become accumulated, superposed.

Challenges of memory work

Los fuegos internos acknowledges the possibilities as well as the challenges and limits of this memory work. The opening scene suggests one of these limits, particularly in relation to our understanding of mental suffering. In this scene, the camera captures a naked man walking in the forest, disoriented and confused. We do not see his face; we hear heavy breathing, hinting at fear. The man starts to run, as if he were fleeing from someone or something—not visible to the viewer. He moves his hands violently toward his back, as if he were trying to fight off an attacker—not visible to the viewer. During the whole scene, the viewer watches this anonymous character from outside, closely or at a distance. That is, the camera shots are not taken from the man’s perspective, which would create the illusion that the viewer is perceiving what the man is perceiving at that particular moment, as if they were looking over his shoulder or, even more, from inside his head. The viewer only has access to the images from outside. They do not know what is going on in the man’s head, which thoughts and fears he has, from what or whom he is fleeing. The distance between the character and the viewer, created through the filmic narration, alludes to the distance between someone experiencing a critical moment of mental suffering (a persecutory psychosis, in this case) and those surrounding them. We cannot exactly know or perceive what is happening inside a person’s head at that moment, the movie reminds us.

Los fuegos internos highlights not only the viewer’s limited understanding of mental suffering, but also the challenges the filmic characters face while trying to remember and express their experiences of mental suffering. Acknowledging that it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to accurately express these experiences, Germán, Miguel, and Daniel seek to give an artistic shape to their personal stories and memories of mental suffering: through poems, dance, and dramatic reenactments. The first voice we hear in the movie is that of Daniel, reading one of his poems (quoted in the beginning of this article): “I can describe the war to you. War, yes, without weapons. Only suppressed words. The voices are the grenades. The restraints, the tanks. The pills, the bullets.” Focusing on this poem, Alan Robinson (2020) argues that some experiences of mental suffering, including forced hospitalization, are “inenarrable” (incapable of being narrated); they can only be expressed through metaphors. Indeed, Daniel uses diverse metaphors in his poems, including those related to war, while trying to accurately communicate his personal experiences of mental suffering during hospitalization, and those of others:

“The truth is that each of us had their own military hierarchy in combat, some of them with a longer treatment, others with knowledge of the field, others feeling insecure, and with different stories, told at night before the dream arrives” (El Cisne del Arte, 2019).

According to our perspective, the effect of this war-like imagery is twofold. On the one hand, it highlights the violent dimensions of psychiatric hospitalization, making visible memories of violence that otherwise would not be recognized as such. On the other hand, it embeds Daniel’s personal memories of violence (and those of his friends, Miguel and Germán) within a larger repertoire of memories by people going through hospitalization, who each have their own story.

In fact, while we hear Daniel’s voice reading his first poem, we see a series of images from inside the psychiatric institution Dr. Alejandro Korn: wire fences surrounding the hospital, people lying in bed, on benches, on the ground, shaking hands holding a cigarette, medical personnel handing out medication, bookshelves full of dossiers with the names of the patients (not chronologically ordered: CASTRO, PEREZ G, LABRA, MANERO EDGARDO, LEDESMA C, etc.), a malfunctioning TV screen showing a children’s program with puppets, people wandering around, people sharing mate. Their faces do not appear in the frame and, if they do, the images are out of focus. Taking into account that these depersonalized images may respond to privacy measures related to the in-patients of the hospital, they certainly affect the filmic narration. The images create an impersonal, depressing atmosphere, providing visual footage to Daniel’s poetic descriptions of feelings of “humiliation” and “abandonment,” of being “ignored” and “despised” during hospitalization (El Cisne del Arte, 2019).

These poetic figurations contrast with the multiple meanings associated with fire, a recurring element throughout Los fuegos internos. Pain is counterbalanced by art, friendship, and love, reflecting the idea of a possible community; one that fire, in its ancestral role as a gathering and convocation element, symbolically represents. This is particularly evident in the final scene, where the three friends come together around a fire by the riverside. Across the film, words, images, and metaphors operate like a play of opposites that do not negate one another but instead complement each other: freedom and confinement, suffering and joy, affection and loneliness, danger and warmth.

Fragmented memories of mental suffering are another challenge represented in Los fuegos internos. This is particularly evident in the scenes featuring dramatic reenactments of critical moments of mental suffering suffered by the protagonists. In one of these scenes, for example, Daniel is taken by the police for walking naked on the streets—he thought he was invisible without his clothes, he later explains. We hear a man (a caring relative?) in the background, begging the police not to take him away: “This boy is ill, he is ill” (El Cisne del Arte, 2019). Based on Daniel’s personal memories, this scene alludes to recurrent, oftentimes traumatic experiences by people who, while going through a critical moment of mental suffering, are taken by the police—followed in many cases by forced hospitalization.

The images and sounds in this scene are not synchronized, which is characteristic also for other scenes in the movie featuring dramatic reenactments of lived experiences of mental suffering. The lack of synchronization not only produces a feeling of disorientation and confusion in the viewer, perhaps resembling the sometimes overwhelmingly disorienting effects of mental suffering. It also highlights the difficult process of memory-making in relation to experiences of mental suffering, collecting bits and pieces, trying to make sense of different fragments of memories, sounds, images, smells, as well as the gaps and lacunas.

Possibilities of collaborative memory work

Acknowledging the challenges of fragmentation, Los fuegos internos poses the possibility of collaborative memory work as a way to (re)construct personal memories of mental suffering. In fact, when Daniel starts to tell his story—and the same goes for Germán and Miguel later in the movie–, we see him, in the present, sitting at the table of the artistic space of El Cisne del Arte together with the other workshop participants. The scene includes several close-ups of their artistic creations: paintings, poems and drawings hanging on the wall, hand-crafted books and pencils lying around the table. Daniel’s personal memory-making process, the movie shows us, is fostered within this artistic, communitarian space, supported and sustained by the other participants. Treated as artistic materials, Daniel’s memories become part of a cinematographic co-creation.

The possibilities of this passage from memory to fiction, as described by Laura Lago (personal interview, 2022), are particularly evident in the scenes featuring Germán. Germán recounts that he was lying in a hospital bed for three years, experiencing mystical delusions and death thoughts. He had lost hope, thinking that he would never get out of the hospital. “I wanted a way out, and they gave me the opportunity here,” he says (El Cisne del Arte, 2019), referring to El Cisne del Arte and other workshops offered as part of the Community Mental Health Center. “The hospital made me lose my personality,” he continues, “I’m still looking for myself, looking for who I was” (El Cisne del Arte, 2019).

Germán’s verbal testimony is followed by a scene in which he uses bodily movements without words to bear witness to his experiences of mental suffering during hospitalization. The setting of the scene is a dark, abandoned site in ruins, featuring walls covered with cobwebs and bird feathers on the ground. We hear the sounds of electrical shocks, which viewers may associate with electroconvulsive therapy or ECT, which today is still used as a treatment, specifically in cases of severe depression and schizophrenia. The camera shows Germán lying on the ground, covered with dirt. We do not see his face yet. His legs are shaking. The next shot is dark with a scarce spot of light on the ground. A hand reaches toward that light. Subsequent shots show Germán covering his face with his hands and arms; Germán lying on the ground again, his legs shaking; his hands making tense, complicated angles; Germán trying to lift up with unstable, shaking legs.

In La Haije’s interview with Laura Lago, she shares insights into the creative process behind this scene. The movements we see on the screen, she explains, are those that “reminded [Jorge] and expressed, at the same time, what had happened to him there,” when he was hospitalized during a critical moment of mental suffering (Lago, 2022, personal interview, our translation). Jorge worked together with a choreographer to give an artistic shape to his personal memories of mental suffering through bodily movements, which they later filmed. He then selected the different shots for the final scene. As Laura explains, this creative process helped Jorge to take a certain distance from what had happened to him: “One does something with the response of a material, in this case the movement. They make certain decisions, and in some way detach themselves from that past” (Lago, 2022, personal interview, our translation). That is, by performing, then filming, then editing the raw material of his lived experiences of mental suffering, Jorge was able to create an artistic, reflexive distance from those experiences.

In/outside the hospital

The second part of Los fuegos internos centers on recent experiences by the three protagonists after hospitalization. We see Germán working in the carpentry workshop, which is part of the Community Mental Health Center. He explains how important this community space (like the one sustained by El Cisne del Arte) was during his recovery process, as well as his friendship with Miguel and Daniel: “It’s the open door to a new world. That’s the meaning of all this, right? This group of friends. We are so close, Daniel, Miguel and myself” (El Cisne del Arte, 2019). The following scenes show images of their daily life after hospitalization, sharing mate and talking about future plans (traveling, finding a job, seeing a girlfriend), cooking together and washing the dishes.

Interestingly, the images from daily life outside the hospital are oftentimes followed or preceded by images from daily life inside the hospital. For example, after a close-up of the plate prepared by Daniel and Germán (milanesa, a typical Argentinian meat dish) follows a close-up of the plate that is being served in the hospital (a rice and lentils dish). And, conversely, after the shot of a woman washing the plates in the kitchen of the hospital, the movie includes a shot of Daniel doing the dishes at home. We go from outside to inside the hospital, and then from inside to outside the hospital again. According to our perspective, the filmic narration here represents the (sometimes involuntary) back-and-forth movements that are part of the memory-making process of the three protagonists. A meal cooked at home brings back memories of the meals served at the hospital. While doing the dishes at home, they remember where they are in the present, outside the hospital. “We are free, loco,” Daniel reminds his friends (El Cisne del Arte, 2019). ⁶ “Yes, we are free. We are outside,” Miguel responds (El Cisne del Arte, 2019).

Between memories and jokes about shared experiences and memorable characters from the hospital (e.g. “the gray head that plays the organ”), Germán observes that “there are many kinds of people in the hospital,” after which Miguel responds: “Yes. Each one has their story” (El Cisne del Arte, 2019). Los fuegos internos, they remind us, is not only about them and their personal memories of mental suffering. More importantly, it seeks to contribute to a collective memory-making process in which the stories of people experiencing mental suffering are being listened to, remembered, shared, and valued.

The public manifestations of this memory work are particularly evident in one of the final scenes in which we see Germán, Daniel, and other workshop participants contributing to the radio program Razonamiento desencadenado (“Unleashed Reasoning”), which is part of the collaborative productions of El Cisne del Arte. Shots from inside the radio station, where we hear and see Germán, Daniel, and the others talking through the microphone, are intercalated with shots from the outside: people in the park, at home, in the hospital, or at work listening to the radio program. In this way, Los fuegos internos shows the potential of the medium of the radio, not only to give a platform to stories about mental suffering which are oftentimes excluded from the mainstream media, but also to reach a broad audience who listens to these stories. ⁷ Radio, poetry, testimony, all of which are present in the movie, have in common the gesture of taking voice and communicating it with others; an act of agency and empowerment by those who historically and socially have been silenced or muted.

The 2010 National Mental Health Law (26.657) is one of the topics that is addressed as part of the radio program Razonamiento desencadenado. Considered to be a “substantial step forward” in protecting the rights of people who experience mental suffering (Barcala and Faraone, 2023: 579), this ambitious legislation calls for the development of a community-based, interdisciplinary assistance model in mental health that safeguards the human rights of those who experience mental suffering, as well as the implementation of institutional bodies that monitor the promotion and protection of rights in mental health care facilities. One of the key objectives of the law is the closure of all psychiatric institutions by 2020, which should be substituted by hospitalization spaces in general hospitals, as well as open-door care facilities (e.g. assisted living facilities, night and day hospitals, community residences). To date, this objective has not been accomplished.

The radio presenters provide critical perspectives on the National Mental Health Law. Daniel, for example, stresses the need to carefully think through the alternative care system which would replace the psychiatric hospitals: “We’ll close the hospital but we are not creating something better, either a better building, more professional workers, more supplies, anything” (El Cisne del Arte, 2019). Indeed, the implementation of the National Mental Health Law has been incomplete, due to a structural lack of governmental investments in infrastructure, personnel and other resources which are necessary for the development of this alternative care system (Levin, 2023; Zaldúa et al., 2016). In addition to the mental health care reforms, a “reeducation” in society is needed, Daniel continues, providing accurate information about mental suffering with the aim to counter persistent stigmas: “Let’s be clear: we pay our taxes, we have cellphones, many of us work. We are human beings who think. [. . .] We can help to get rid of the stigma of being crazy in our society” (El Cisne del Arte, 2019).

Sharing Daniel’s view, Alan Robinson argues in his essay on Los fuegos internos that the movie can contribute to the “transformation of an anti-psychotic society” (2020, n.p., our translation), toward one in which people who went through hospitalization are not only seen and recognized as subjects of rights, but also as experienced experts in mental health. According to our perspective, and in line with Robinson’s argument, these experienced experts are vital to the slow memory work that is presently being carried out through arts-based practices. As the final scenes of Los fuegos internos suggest, Daniel, Miguel, Germán, and others who went through hospitalization can inform and transform the ways in which society remembers, and oftentimes tends to forget, the stories by those who experience mental suffering.

Conclusion

Memories of people with lived experiences of mental suffering are frequently marginalized or disbelieved, reflecting social exclusions through which certain lives are rendered less grievable and less visible in collective memory (Butler, 2006; Knittel, 2014). Arts-based practices, such as the Argentinian collaborative film project Los fuegos internos, intervene in these exclusions, creating spaces where people affected by mental suffering can express and collectively shape memory. These practices urge us to critically reflect on which memories are centered, and which are marginalized, whose stories are valued, and whose are dismissed. They foster artistic co-creations that include people with lived experiences of mental suffering as part of the creative team (e.g. protagonists, artists, and co-producers). In doing so, these practices affirm their role as creators of collective memory, enabling them to exercise agency in representing their personal experiences, stories, and memories.

Los fuegos internos exemplifies this slow memory work in multiple ways. It makes visible the often overlooked yet persistent forms of stigmatization, social exclusion, and psychiatric violence, as well as the enduring practices of care, solidarity, friendship, and everyday resistance in and outside the mental hospital. Moreover, the film transforms deeply personal experiences of mental suffering into artistic expressions (through poetry, dance, etc.) that others can witness, and that can contribute to gradually reshaping collective memory. For example, Daniel’s poetic piece featuring the war metaphor makes visible the coercive and violent dimensions of psychiatric hospitalization, situating these personal experiences within broader societal debates about memory and human rights. At the same time, the collaborative process of filmmaking allows participants to negotiate how memories are expressed and represented, using humor, fiction, and diverse artistic expressions to navigate traumatic experiences and assert control over their own narratives. Los fuegos internos illustrates how arts-based slow memory work can open spaces where the memories of those experiencing mental suffering are acknowledged, shared, and valued, and where they begin to take their place within collective memory-making.