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Based on the experience of his incarceration in the Lecumberri prison in 1968, the communist Mexican writer José Revueltas wrote the novel “El Apando”, a crude meditation on the coexistence between the prisoners of the first panopticon built in Mexico in the 19th century.
In addition to recounting the grotesque reality of the inhabitants of this punishment machine, reduced to satisfy their desires in subhuman conditions, the protagonist's monologue embodies in his descriptions the aesthetic effects of the oppression caused by the geometry of confinement, the hypodermic surveillance and physical abuse.
All of these aspects of the prison, which were captured by Revueltas in his text (unpublished in German), can also be said of the experiences that we are living today in the Coronavirus-era under conditions of confinement and social distancing. Likewise, this reflects our current context of a narcissistic, consumerist society that not only creates abundant waste, but which also creates social marginalization and alienation.
Inaugurated in 1900 by the dictator Porfirio Díaz, Lecumberri prison was Mexico’s first rationally conceived seclusion project, based on the designs of Jeremy Bentham. Barely a decade after beginning operations, it became the paradigm of what would become Mexican prisons: factories of corruption and human degradation.
Known as the "Black Palace of Lecumberri" —a true branch of hell on earth— it was permanently closed in 1976 and transformed into the headquarters of the General Archive of the Nation, an institution dedicated to caring for the documentary memory of Mexico. Among the most famous people who were detained there are Ramón Mercader (Leon Trotsky's murderer), Pancho Villa, William Burroughs and the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Based on excerpts from Revueltas’ novel, this radio piece is a meditation on the new and omnipresent reality of isolation and seclusion that we live in nowadays, made with sound walks recorded inside ex-Lecumberri prison and its surroundings, shopping centers, clandestine recordings from the Reclusorio Norte (Northern Prison) in Mexico City, and fragments of electronic music made by Mexican composers related to themes of imprisonment.
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