Nitouche Anthoussi: Species of Heterotopia at The Opening Gallery

By DAVID JAGER June 20, 2024 

Heterotopias, or, as Michel Foucault called them ‘crisis Heterotopias’, are special social spaces structured by humans in extreme transitional periods. Adolescence, marriage, physical and mental illness, incarceration, immigration, even death: all of these are states or rites of passage that require specialized social spaces. They can be boarding schools, brothels, psychiatric hospitals, honeymoon suites, prisons, or cemeteries. What counts is, according to Foucault, that they structure time and space in a radically different way from that of the outside world. 

Nitouche Anthoussi has an abiding fascination with Heterotopias, and she has discovered one almost too wild to be believed. Nine hours off the coast of Greece is the tiny island of Leros, which came to international attention when it was discovered to house a scandalous mental institution.

The reasons were many. The conditions were  abysmal, and the facility was used to house patients that were deemed too difficult for insitutions elsewhere on the mainland. Second, it was also used to house political dissidents and finally, refugees from the middle east. This giant three in one facility, built during Greeces fascist period, essentially formed the entirety of the Island’s economy. Its discovery in 1989 shocked the international community.  

As a graduate student of the Sorbonne, Anthoussi had always wanted to explore and document social spaces where people designated as disturbed, dissident or stateless were kept separate from society at large.  For this reason her discovery of the existence of Leros was almost too fortuitous to be believed.  

“I have always been deeply fascinated by and sympathetic towards individuals on the margins of society” she said in an interview. “I was drawn to Foucault’s work because, like him, I was very interested in the way social institutions both classify, survey and discipline individuals they designate as ‘other’. Psychiatric patients, political dissidents, and refugees are the three major classes of people that fit these parameters. So it’s fascinating that I found a facility that kept all three.”  

Installation view. 

“This is why the discovery of Leros was so incredible” She continues “I was equally fascinated by Ellis Island, this facility for accepting the self-exiled and displaced peoples from other countries. Both institutions, both of them on Islands, were special facilities for either detaining or processing people who were designated as unfit for society or who opted to leave their societies of origin, to reinvent themselves.” 

Anthoussi’s photographs document the derelict interiors of these spaces. The facilities on Leros and Ellis Island have since been shut down. Shells of the massive institutions that they once were, they are replete with whispers and ghosts. As places of crisis, Heterotopias are generally hidden or shielded from the rest of society, just as we are not supposed to see the inside of a slaughterhouse.  Anthoussi’s photographs thus serve as both an expose and a documentation of the traces of state power, a melancholy tour of the surveillance state and its discontents. 

Each photograph is haunted by the furtive and transitory nature of these spaces. The architecture, like all institutional architecture, is deeply functional and inhuman. It is immediately obvious that these are not spaces to be inhabited in any normal sense of the word. It is a space where individuals are kept and managed. Anthoussi’s lens manages to capture this deep carceral nature of each abandoned room and hallway. 

Another interesting detail are the traces of resistance to it, usually in the form of sprayed slogans or personal messages. Especially in those spaces on Leros that served as transitional spaces for refugees, one sees scrawled language on the walls, attempts at human presence in the face of individual erasure. Under the panoptic lens of surveillance and classification, humans resort to old fashioned mark making.

Installation view. 

Another interesting work, done entirely with computer animation software, is Anthoussi’s attempt to model one of the derelict spaces on Leros. Architectural software is generally reserved for Utopias, or idealized social spaces that exist nowhere: the serene and pixel perfect portrayals of future condominiums or housing developments exist only in the imaginations of architects and real estate developers. 

Anthoussi is thus using the machinery of Utopia to map a heterotopia, just so we can experience the gritty cognitive dissonance. How well does rendering software do in the portrayal of an abandoned sleeping bag, or trash, or political graffiti? In her video, the machinery of idealization is made instead to portray heterotopic spaces of crisis. 

Which is the point. Michel Foucault said that the perfect space of Utopia is the mirror, in that it perfectly reflects social space, but is literally nothing but an image with no depth, no reality or location. Anthoussi’s camera and computer software serve as a mirror for these marginalized spaces of crisis that institutions would rather keep hidden. She is opening the neutral space of the gallery to the dark secrets of our current panoptic dystopia. WM