Sogno#5

Sogno # 5 investigates bipolarity, a mental disfunction typical of our contemporary society.

I decide to represent such issue asking bipolar patients to go back and perform – improvising a physical script on the grounds of an emotional rewriting of August Strindberg’s The dream – into the spaces in the past devoted to internment and psychic therapy and today abandoned to negligence and attacked by the force of nature. Like in a game of mirrors, mental disorder and the collapse of the public space reflect in each other.

Almost thirty years after its official closure, the Leonardo Bianchi Psychiatric Hospital remains perched with its immense mass right in the hearth of the city of Naples. 220.000 square meters of pavilions, corridors and rooms that from 1897 to 2000, when the last patient was dismissed, have turned into the locus of stories relating to largest mental hospital in the South of Italy. Today the Hospital, totally unused, stands as a huge repository of past remembrances, closed to the public and unknown to the inhabitants of the city.

Lorenzo Castore