Franco Rotelli, Carmen Roll, Giovanna Gallio

Franco Rotelli, Carmen Roll, Giovanna Gallio at the Spanish Pavilion.

Trieste, ex Ospedale psichiatrico di Trieste, Basagliana: conversation between Carmen Roll, Franco Rotelli, Peppe Dell’Acqua, Giovanna Gallio and Stefano Graziani.

14 June

Thirty years after the Basaglian revolution, which Basaglia started and the persons in this conversation, among others, accomplished, the issue is now if such a revolution can regress, in a time when personal freedom, right to work, emancipation and social compromise mean little.

Everything started, about this “L’Inadeguato” project, two years ago, with the first visit I did to the ex-mental hospital of Trieste, 2009. I wanted to re-enact one of the “assemblies” Basaglia used to do in Gorizia, giving the possibility to speak to people who had had no word for decades (the ricoverati or mental patients). As he said, what was important was not at all what they said, what was fundamental was giving the possibility of choice (to speak, to speak not) to people who never had any before.

This was not possible, because such an exercise in nostalgia couldn’t be tolerated by the people who worked there, who kept working after the death of Basaglia in 1979.

Since then I visited many mental houses, and day centers, in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Germany (Breitenau), Belgium, Spain. I can say, Trieste is unique. Nowhere in the world these two concepts make sense but in Trieste: “emancipation” and “NOT socially dangerous”.

So I can say that in Trieste I met people who changed completely the way I think. But, as Giovanna Gallio said today: “what is relevant now, even when we have conquered, even when no one would dare say we were wrong, is: never leave the margins, never fully integrate in the mainstream of psychiatry”

Many thanks to them for coming today to that pavilion – that ghost, the pavilion, I am still trying to get.