Do you know what happened in the Pergine Valsugana asylum?

In such a controverse and extraordinary period, I wanted to discuss important themes. I tried to graphically communicate strong emotions in order to engage readers and make them reflect, so that they can form their own opinion about events, that should not be forgotten and from which we can still learn. This is the reason why I chose to deal with the topic of mental health during the 1900s in Trentino-Alto Adige and its most exemplary establishment: the Pergine Valsugana ex-asylum. The main concept of the project is to present a total institution in its purpose: give an order to society by getting problematic and eccentric individuals away and isolate them in asylums, just like in jails. In its continuous interweaving of order and eccentricity, this project, Stigma: storia di un’istituzione totale, aims to present facts from the point of view of an ordered and hierarchical institution.

To organise the huge amount of unstructured and disorganised information I managed to retrieve, I decided to sort the contents in four main themes and chapters (Voci, Istituzione totale, Antidoto, and Gusci) and to bind the whole publication as an archive of documents of different nature.