Workhouse

The workhouses were a kind of concentration camps where poor inhabitants of England were taken around the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The workhouses didn't function as asylums at all, they rather resembled prisons where the poor and the unemployed were sent and where they were forced to work in various workshops producing artisan-ship products which were consequently sold. Michel Foucault mentions workhouses very often, seeing in them an early stage of the contemporary forms of exclusion and marginalization of those elements of the population who do not fit the general rule. Subsequently, the workhouses function as an emblematic archetype of the heterotopia -the place of all those who have no place; they are the places destined to accept all those who are unacceptable, who belong nowhere.

The notion of the comical, when pushed to its edge (to the point where it functions as a revealing signifier) consists in a fatal refusal of every form of stability, a refusal without terms or limits, without any compromises. Thus, the comic (the one who is determined by the notion of the comical, either as the one who sets it in motion by doing something comical, either as the one who undergoes its effects, who suffers it) is out-casted, exiled from the area where certainties, hierarchies of rules, principles and solid points of reference still exist.

So the comic becomes the perfect outcast, the outsider by excellence. He is the one liberated by everything because he is the one who has the property and the capacity to laugh about and at everything. His refusal works as a creative factor for a free world and, of course, for a world-freedom, where one can only gain access under the condition to refuse every other world.

The animated film “Workhouse” is not destined to be “read” and neither does it attempt to produce a precise, closed and unilateral meaning. Essentially, it consists of an apposition of elements, images, signs, symbols and archetypes of the comical universe who are put there to set in function the comical, to “activate” it and, consequently to reveal its tragic substrate, its uncompromising nature and, of course, the violence that constantly derives from it.