More than thirty years after its closure, the Leonardo Bianchi Psychiatric Hospital remains perched, as a huge repository of past remembrances, in the hearth of the city of Naples. To construct a not purely documentary testimony of it, we asked a theatre group composed of psychiatric patients to reinterpret the ambiance and we used the camera to leave a visual trace of their performance. The actors improvised on the grounds of an emotional rewriting of August Strindberg’s The dream: the text helped us emphasize tensions and memories - fear, desire, pain - and to create new interactions with the space.
Built in 1897 and officially closed in 1983, the Leonardo Bianchi Psychiatric Hospital is secured with its huge mass in the heart of Naples, Italy. 220,000 thousand square meters of pavilions and ambulatories in which the stories of the greatest asylum of the South of Italy have been lying dormant.
For almost a century, men and women crossed its threshold never to come back again. Every slight deviation from the norm, every troublesome human being, every undesirable ‘sinner’ could find shelter in here, and be forgotten in here.
Behind its walls a self-sufficient community, made of a patients, doctors and nuns, has fed a city within the city with its own artisanal studios, its own fields to cultivate, its own churches: from bread to the roses that grew in the director’s garden, everything was created and consumed within the borders of the mental institution.
Nowadays the Bianchi institute is a ghost town. Its scraped walls and the rust of its gates, its gardens’ riotous and wild nature, its closed rooms and dusty silences, treasure memories as a secret. The Bianchi is a maze. A vertigo between past and present.
But how could we revitalize the empty spaces? Our answer passed through the creative reinterpretation of the asylum by an acting group composed of psychiatric patients. The actors improvised on the grounds of an emotional rewriting of August Strindberg’s The dream. Together, they took off the dust of the years and experienced the soul of the place.
Irene Alison