Of Pandemics and Heterotopias, 2020
Pandemics in Focus. Photographic Documentation
“Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures.”
Michel Foucalt, Des Espace Autres
Since its inception in 1946, the National Institute of Medical Sciences and Nutrition Salvador Zubirán has positioned itself in the excellence of assistance, teaching, and research within the public national institutes of the Health Department in Mexico City.
While covering the Covid-19 pandemic, I wanted to focus on the people, all the people that made this hospital seem like this was absolutely normal. Environmental service workers washing windows, mopping floors, the strong, repetitive hands of those laundering and pressing bed sheets, emergency medical service employees carrying patients in or out of stretchers or unto wheelchairs, anaesthetists aiding intubation, cooks feeding administrative personnel, lab specialists performing tests, voluntarily assigned physicians willing to learn the new reality from residents, transporters carrying oxygen tanks, nurses buzzing everywhere, technicians and maintenance staff fixing ventilators, security forces in or outside the institute, paramedics moving patients to other facilities or pathology crew dissecting and filling paperwork at the morgue.
What most people are unable to grasp is that these Foucauldian heterotopias have made a gigantic effort in changing their usual logistics and internal processes. Triage for example, admitting and testing patients within a facility changed entire protocols in a few weeks, once a patient is first screened, to determine the urgency of their condition. If admitted, the physician takes them either to intensive care or to a room for initial testing, after they clear this area, they leave a door hanger with the “Dirty” word printed in it. As soon as the cleaning staff notices them, they take over the room and disinfect it in its entirety, leaving a “Clean” hanger on the door. Over and over again.
What is absolutely true, is the fact that human species have been able to survive due to their communication skills. To contain other viruses and publish the proceedings, to make advancements and technological improvements based on scientific research and observation. To decode how, minuscule things break our organisms or prevent, as much as it can be done, large catastrophic events that can easily question the monarchy of the Anthropocene. This single skill, formal or informal storytelling is the real cure of an event of this magnitude, disinformation and ignorance, the real virus.
