Until You Change 1
She is alone for a maximum of seven minutes, a minimum of four, for her shower. Ahead of her, hours of Catholic music, study of Alcoholics Anonymous literature and therapy for her homosexuality ‘disorder’.
Until You Change 2
In front of the mirror, the ‘patient’ is observed by another girl, who monitors the correct application of the make-up. At 7.30am, she blots her lips with femininity, daubs cheeks, until she is deemed a ‘proper woman’.
Until You Change 3
The young women enter the dining room in a line. They say ‘buen provecho’, eat their lunch in silence and say thank you. No looking up or talking occurs. On their plates is cheap tuna and rice, bread or bad noodle soup.
Until You Change 4
Each imprisoned woman spends hours and hours of her time on cleaning duties. Each day she is allocated to a cleaning group for the office, corridor, kitchen or bathroom. The girls later recall feeling empty or worse, feeling nothing. If the staff are not satisfied with her work, they insult and beat their charge on the spot.
Until You Change 5
Every night the women take different types of pills, often described as vitamins but not labelled. The drugs vary in colour; some cause insomnia, others memory loss. The girl suspects, but is not sure, that she was raped after taking one of these pills.
Until You Change 6
A girl is beaten with a TV cable for failing to pick up her bag from a chair, often other gay teenagers in the centre witness this. A book of anomalies worthy of punishment is read aloud daily to the group.
Until You Change 7
The memories of the girl return to the cables and rope which feature in many stories from these private clinics. Sometimes yelling, other times sedated, sometimes left in a bath of ice water until restless.
Until You Change 8
In the bathroom, she must be vigilant when mopping and scrubbing every surface with a toothbrush. She must pick up all the hairs on the floor. If she makes a mistake, an orderly pushes her bare hand into the toilet bowl and holds her down until it is clean.
Until You Change 9
The first time she was tied up was the night her parents hired men to sedate and kidnap her in order to bring her to the centre. Once there, she has been tied to a bed or left in the bathroom on many nights.
Until You Change
I discovered that around 200 clandestine centres are in operation. Over three quarters of Catholics and Protestants in Ecuador believe homosexuality is morally wrong and oppose gay marriage. Parents send their children to otherwise clandestine legal drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres that operate as a front which house an alarming number of gay men, women and transsexuals. I spent six months interviewing a woman who had been sent to one of these religious ‘clinics’ by her parents and locked up for a number of months. With time, I gathered more first person accounts.
The centres’ secrecy made it impossible to approach this issue using traditional documenting practices. Instead I set out to reconstruct a series of images, based on details from real life accounts, using myself as the protagonist and carefully sourcing locations, actors and props. I incorporated my own emotions and experiences with theatrical methods to explore the abuse of women in these institutions.
These staged images allow us to see what was never meant to be seen. The perversion of pills and prayer books; the regime of forced femininity in make-up, short skirts and high heels; torture by rope or rubber gloves; the spectre of ‘corrective’ rape.
The human rights of these young men and women are disregarded by Ecuador’s government, these centers are camouflaged and hidden in remote areas and small towns in Ecuador.
Currently the Ecuadorean State does not have the capacity to regulate these clandestine places, and owner’s of these places are usually the military, the police, and doctors who hold the power. In some cases these horrendous tortures occur inside of churches and in worst instances the government is some what complicit in these actions.
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