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An island of madness: the social force of mental fortresses – a visual essay

Madness is an island. Like geographical islands, it isolates. Mad people have been, and still are frequently locked up in asylums. As Foucault had told us, these are often converted leprosy colonies, which were outside the cities in order to avoid contagion. Similarly but unreflectively, the isolating gesture towards the mad comes out of fear of contamination. Thus, the rupturing of social bonds that caused the madness in the first place is reiterated. This is our vision of madness. To turn this vision into a film, we have filmed on an island, Seili, off the coast of Turku, Finland. Seili is part of an archipelago of some thousand islands. Founded in 1619 as a Leper Colony, the last leper died there in 1785. It continued to serve as a hospital for the mentally ill until 1962. On this history-heavy island, we set a number of scenes to use in our film A Long History of Madness (Cinema Suitcase 2011). This is a textual-visual essay, consisting of photographs and video stills that demonstrate the isolating quality of the island as an ‘island of madness’.