"On Revive the Ambience: Emotion is Alive" by Moises Ramirez
Revive the Ambience is a pictorial publishing house centered on disability awareness. According to Stefan Foster, the eye behind the lens and creator of Revive the Ambience, the project is “an effort to change how we think and portray the disabled and the experience of caregiving today.” Outmoded care practices relating to childhood illnesses like tuberculosis, as well as mental health and disabilities support tactics of the past remain suspended (carcinogenic airspace is dangerous, it should be noted) in the abandoned spaces of arcane facilities whose loss of funding was due primarily to the revelation of dehumanizing treatment of patients.
Media over time has presented the public with entertaining portrayals of life in the asylums or of renegade clinicians performing their work clandestinely. Miloš Forman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) remains my primary visual imprint or optical caricature of what clinical methods existed at the time: silencing the patient through methods of immobilization, involving chemical or spatial-architectural constraints. The Rosenhan Experiment at Stanford University attempted to test the reliability of diagnosis and subsequent admission into such spaces. Participants, who were students that feigned psychiatric symptoms, would, once inside, attempt to get out with a clean bill of health. This proved to be more difficult than anticipated, the students having become the “psychiatric objects” that R.D. Laing had warned against in his seminal text Divided Self. From the doctor, or captor’s, perspective, the existential component of human existence was no longer considered relevant, replaced with signs and symptoms of a disease that could be prodded, restrained, and ideally, managed. Rick Alverson’s The Mountain (2018) stars Jeff Goldblum as a lobotomist given to house-calls in a fictional re-telling of that invasive mental procedure’s history. The determination of the doctor’s belief in his method at curing seizures, depression, or other hysterical symptoms provided the motivation, according to the film, to sustain such a gruesome and violent practice. Does mental care need to be a dialectic between violence and humane treatment?
“Emotion is Alive: An Immersive Exhibit” took place in the basement of Black Spring Books in Williamsburg in November of 2021. The atmosphere of the exhibit, a special two-night only gallery-styled presentation, was comprised not only of artifacts, archival materials, and most notably the author’s briefcase full of reading material that inspired their art and life, but actual vials or ampules and rusted syringes that were carefully collected for the viewer’s examination. Atmospheric ambient music dialed in by Foster’s musical aesthetics, complemented by video projections against one of the walls, completed the experience. The unfinished texture of the basement resonated equally with the decadence found in Foster’s photographic images. After the event, Foster and I found ourselves in conversation relating to the existential limitation of spatiality and how textures and resonances can imprint into the unconscious terrain of the subject. Unfortunately, no recorded document was made of that exchange, save for my notes here, such as they are, but we hope to engage the larger community to take part in such considerations of the topic in the future.
Gallery visitors at Revive the Ambience show in the basement of Black Spring Books. Photo by Stefan Foster.
Dealing with mental and physical disabilities can be wearisome and heartbreaking, but the strength required to maintain daily upkeep is akin to a vase whose constant replenishment ought not be neglected. Foster incorporated images of his brother, whose own disability drives the platform that makes Foster’s artwork resonate with heartfelt warmth and radiance. The eyes that capture abandoned beauty in decadence are ones that see with more than just what meets the eye. Some of the images contain windows, X-rays, bathtubs, and television sets—objects suggesting other worlds illusory or distant, visions into or out from the position of a ghost. In the past, I too have experienced the anguish of providing support for a family member’s mental health difficulties, a situation now stabilized for many years. Like Foster, I have observed from experience that sometimes reality and hallucinations integrate.
Is it possible for mental and physical disabilities to be tended at the home, or a home-like environment? What is it to be a human being entwined with the social networks of daily ordinary life culture? Foster calls into question the difference between sanitorium or psych-ward care vs. the Family-Type, advocating for more humane treatment of patients through training and funding the types of residencies that are able to provide as much rather than allowing a patient to be relegated to suffer in a psych-ward hospital as in the past.
Stefan Foster at the exhibit.
The book printed in conjunction with the exhibit, Official Compilation—Codes, Rules and Regulations of the State of Emotion, is encased in a three-ring binder of sea-foam green color, which itself resembles the type of artifact that would be found on top of a dusty table inside one of the abandoned asylums that Foster is prone to explore (trespassing is unlawful, let us remember). The three divisions of the book are split into poetic collages incorporating archival images, photographs taken by Foster, and arrangements of language. Regarding the words on these pages, there are unique typographic shapes as well as scattered quotations from NYS law manuals, as well as Senate Bills relating to the quality of care for the disabled. Also found incorporated into the work is the use of Blissymbolics—a forgotten symbol language that at one point was a breakthrough in discovering intellect inside the non-verbal mind. In a way, the visual signifiers of the symbols act like a key to the unconscious domain. The façade of language often masks the ulterior of interior motives.
I will leave you with the same statement that ends the book, one of Foster’s favorite quotations from Frank Ruslander (1920) writing about a tuberculosis sanitarium:
“Of all flowers the human flower needs the sun the most.”
Moises Ramirez is a writer and thinker with two Masters degrees from The New School (Philosophy, Psychology) and is a PhD candidate at European Graduate School. Currently, he is participating in an art residency at Posthuman Lab Network/ Foreign Objekt where he is writing about flanuer-workers.
Stefan Foster is a visual artist, long-term care ombudsman, gravestone conservator and the founder of Revive the Ambience, a publishing house that examines abandoned institutions and natural environments through a lens of emotion. Foster has traveled throughout the United States and parts of Europe to capture photographs of vanishing asylum wards, sanitariums, rare plants and burial sites. With a blend of expository writing and symbols, Foster connects his photographs to a cautionary tale and urges viewers to engage in critical reflection. Revive the Ambience is described as "a multi-media tour de force at the intersection of art and criticism" by leading scholar of rhetoric and critical emotion studies, Lynn Worsham, Ph.D. Founding member of the Go-Go's, Jane Wiedlin, describes the ciphered messages and imagery as "fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time." Foster's abandoned world has also been praised by Russian artist Kedr Livanskiy.
