Sol Prado

Sol Prado gives a performance lecture of a video work still in progress, based on the Greek island of Leros. Leros is a holiday destination for many and a seabound heterotopia for others, it is a place of perverse contrasts where tourists, refugees and mental patients coexist. Sol Prado looks specifically at the layers of history that have culminated in the area of the island called Lakki. During the Italian Fascist regime, Lakki became a naval base comprising of a large barrack and several smaller houses that accommodated high-ranking generals. Post WWII, during the Greek military Junta (1967-1974), the island was used as a place for internal exile for political dissenters, with the old Italian barracks used as an internment camp. In 1959, a mental hospital was founded within the same barracks and only in 1989 were the horrific living conditions and treatment of the patients revealed to the public eye. Today the barracks remain empty and abandoned but the courtyard in front of it has been transformed into a refugee hotspot. This locus of discipline and control is explored by Prado throughout the performance while its past and present presented in chapters.

Throughout her practice Prado has been conducting research on how desire for the West is generated and maintained through the consumption of pop culture, video games and social media. Also looking at how ultimately this desire has the potential to deform into an object of discipline which can act a catalyst for mental illness. For a previous work, called Like 50mg (2016), her research delved into the economics of mental health, specifically addressing how the current economic and political structures in the West avoid addressing the causes of mental illness, rather develop tools that offer instant relief and the illusion of well-being in order to ensure a healthy and constant work force. In Like 50mg, Prado sought to reveal the correlation between the rise in the consumption of antidepressants and economic growth.

Sol Prado is an artist, an independent researcher and a performer. She completed the Independent Program Studies in Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), directed by Paul B. Preciado.
Her work and research is focused on creating fiction (writing, performance, installation, workshops) through the use of ironic and parodical procedures to dismantle, through their intensification, the perverse structure of the neoliberal paradigm. She considers the re-actualization of fascism´s mechanisms is expressed by means of a fine and cosmetic artillery of domestication whose final objective is the privatization of the common forces and thinking.