Forgotten. One thousand patients live together on 200 hectares of land. Young and old are mixed together without any criteria sharing barracks with no privacy and little dignity.

The place is an asylum, a psychiatric institution, divided into two colonies named Colonia Etchepare and Colonia Santin Rossi, located two hours away from Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. Uruguay, a free modern democratic society, has a population made up mainly of descendents of European immigrants, and it was considered for many years the Switzerland of South America.

Some call the place the “Isla de los Locos”(the Island of the Mad). Located in the interior of the country, it is remote enough to be forgotten. It can be left alone in the hope that if no attention is paid, the problem will resolve itself.

Each one of the people living in the “Colonias” have their own story that left them there, alone, far away from the ones that once loved and cared for them.
Why they....? Did they jump the thin line between normalcy and madness; between crisis and pure out of control hysteria? Or was it their poverty that pushed them into this place, abandoned by their own family and society. A society that in most cases never gave them a chance to enter.

So far they have been “forgotten”, and therefore they have never been a point on anyone’s agenda. However, one day we will have to assume responsibility and take action, giving back these people’s dignity and all rights they have lost or never had.