Soy Loco Por Ti Juquery
2018 to 2024
Arts Festival
Franco da Rocha, SP
Brazil
Juquery is a psychiatric hospital that was a leading institute for mental health for over 120 years. A huge colony on a 600,000 square meter plot of land in Franco da Rocha and the surrounding area, on the outskirts of Greater São Paulo city. The facility, which once housed 17,000 inmates (in a chaotic and inhumane manner), is now closed and many of the historic and impressive buildings are empty.
This is the setting for Soy Loco por Ti Juquery. An arts festival that proposes a new meaning for the Juquery Hospital Complex through a cultural occupation. Every September, the facility hosts artistic interventions, including music, theater, installations, workshops, debates, performances, and cinema. Juquery, which usually looks abandoned, is given lighting and scenography, brought to life, and the performances take place in unusual spaces, spread throughout the buildings, gardens, and empty corridors. In addition, the festival promotes an educational program aimed at users of CAPS - Psychosocial Care Centers.
Redefining Juquery
The 6 editions of Soy Loco Por Ti Juquery have brought more than 20,000 people to the venue and reached a total audience of more than 2 million people, with articles on TV Globo, Cultura, Estadão and with communication that spreads throughout the region and through social networks. The Festival has already left its mark on the city and everyone who passes through there. As musician Ranulpho Faria, a classic figure from Franco da Rocha, says, Soy Loco was responsible for a kind of refoundation of Juquery.
Soy Loco Por Ti Juquery was conceived and directed by Victor Fisch and produced by Helena Forghieri.
It has been consolidating itself as a relevant space for reflection and artistic creation, in the line between mental health and art. With increasing support and a consistent and serious history, it has brought together important international partners, such as the Goethe-Institut and the Living Museum (USA/Switzerland), bringing international programs to the festival. This is because it operates in a very important field that is little explored by culture: the link between art and mental health. Or even beyond: the breaking of the boundaries between one and the other, transforming everything into one thing, an aggregate that goes beyond art therapy, a concept for which we do not even have a name, but which is in the field of the symbolic expression of being.
Franco da Rocha is a peripheral city, which for many years carried stigmas, such as the city of the crazy or even of prisons, since some of the colonies in Juquery were transformed into prisons. Today, we see some of this stigma being transformed. The Festival process, together with the reopening of the Osório César Art Museum, and some actions by the City Hall of Franco da Rocha and the Juquery Hospital Complex itself, are bringing important elements of its history to light.
A young resident of Franco da Rocha left a statement during the first edition of the Festival, in 2018, which we believe illustrates precisely the relevance of the project and its objective. She said that she used to be ashamed to say that she was from Franco da Rocha, a poor, peripheral city, associated with crazy people, in her view, and that Soy Loco Por Ti Juquery was a milestone in making her say that she is now proud to be from Franco da Rocha. We understand that this type of experience is the best result that the Festival can achieve, in line with the premise of the National Culture Plan, understanding its impact as a citizenship right. And in the five editions already held, we have been able to see the multiplication of positive effects in the city, the region and the world, such as the transformations in the territory and its population.
Soy Loco still functions as a kind of seed, from which initiatives sprout and spread throughout the world, producing other fruits. Throughout our history, we have been able to observe how Juquery has worked as a magnet for different artists. Some of them were so deeply impacted that their work became part of Juquery in different ways. Some continued to work in partnership with Juquery, while others created new projects inspired by the space and its history. Because it is a festival with a unique characteristic, projects are created with the Festival in mind and take on a life of their own, extending the history of Soy Loco to something over which we have no control. This is where the economic development of culture has an impact, multiplying the initial investments in the project.
Juquery is a space of important architecture, with buildings designed by Ramos de Azevedo (1851 - 1928), beautiful gardens and a very rich history. What we are doing there, through this Festival, is a rescue of extreme value for the local population and, indirectly, even for the history of Brazilian and international psychiatry. For many years, Juquery was a reference as the birthplace of the study of psychiatry in Brazil.
Juquery hides many stories. Most of them are not very happy. Among experiments with patients, “crazy people” who were abandoned by their families and people forcibly admitted due to moral codes of the time. The very concept of treating “madness” has changed a lot since 1898, when Juquery was built. Franco da Rocha is the result of the arrival of residents from around Juquery and the city still lives with this history fully alive.
The use of modern psychiatry, by Osório César and Nise da Silveira, was revolutionary in the treatment of mental disorders. Both worked with art as therapy. Art has a power that is still little used in our society. Osório, who was married to an important Brazilian painter, Tarsila do Amaral, was an innovative doctor who transformed Juquery into a large art studio. Today, the hospital's collection includes more than 8,000 works of art created by interns, which are now part of the Osório Cesar Art Museum (MAOC), which opened in 2020.
Franco da Rocha is no longer on the edge, but at the center. Not the center of a sad and heavy story, but of a story of art, innovation, and culture. Only culture can profoundly transform realities.