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10:49pm March 3, 2012

➸ Thought of another thing [re. "You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": Exploration of disability institutions]

feliscorvus:

youneedacat:

I love looking at pictures of urban exploration. Except. One thing I don’t understand. Is why it is that going into abandoned mental and DD institutions is so interesting to so many people.

I mean, I can understand an ex-inmate going there. (Or staying the fuck away.) I can imagine disabled…

Another thing occurred to me, regarding why people find places like that so fascinating. It’s not just the aesthetic. It’s the fact that, when they’re actually operating, DD/psych wards are so utterly closed off from the rest of the world. Like even moreso than prisons in many ways. So when one of them is abandoned and left to ruin, it becomes this weird liminal space between private/forbidden and raw/exposed. And a lot of people who haven’t actually been locked up find *that* really compelling. And for that sort of person, a hidden/cut-off place suddenly becoming explorable tends to create something irresistible. 

People who *have* been locked up, on the other hand, don’t have any sense of mystery driving them to explore the places they’ve been locked up in, because they already know what sorts of scenes and objects exist behind the walls of institutions. I would imagine some do go back anyway (or visit similar places) for reasons like, as you say, chronicling the history.

Personally, though, despite not having been literally locked up anywhere like that myself, I don’t think I’d be able to explore an abandoned psych facility due to the “air feels like concentrated evil” thing you mention. I’ve always been really easily freaked out by buildings with “heavy air” and even had trouble staying in some of the houses we looked at when I was house-hunting in 2009 for more than a few minutes because it was so clear that something was very, very wrong with the space.

That actually makes sense to me. I have often had this totally unrealistic fantasy where I would be allowed to go into any building I felt like and look around everywhere because people would just know I wasn’t interested in looking at or disclosing anything that would do anyone harm.  Although I was thinking of more mundane sorts of buildings. 

And I know exactly what you mean about better and worse buildings to be in. Some buildings are wonderful and some not nice at all.