Umbrales

The hypertexts of this project were written by interns from the psychiatric building Emil Kraepelin. These real stories are distributed in four sections: past, future, darkness and light. The genre is hypertext fiction, it is made of hypertextual confessional fragments like Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls (2001) with interactive elements like Belen Gache’s Wordtoys (2006). In the section named “darkness” the mouse is used as a lantern which lights up only parts of the text, a technique also used in Speeches and Poemas (2006) by Félix Rémirez. Yolanda de la Torre organized a literary workshop in which she explored with the patients the therapeutic possibilities of writing. References to God are common in the patients’ confessional texts, a sign of the importance of religion for many Mexican people. The technique of changing the text allows the reader to make up different stories, drawing makes the reader a participant of the story who can draw his/her own future like another patient or character and the audio effects recreate the sounds of a psychiatric hospital making the reader feel as he/she was in the place the patients were. (Source: Maya Zalbidea)