Monday - Tuesday 15:00 - 18:00
How Class Kills (The Mental Hospital Condition Photographed by Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo Gardin)
Il Saggiatore
March 11th will mark the centenary of the birth of Franco Basaglia, the inspiration for law 180 of 1978, known as the Basaglia Law, which provided for the progressive abolition of mental asylums in Italy. The mental institution, before Franco Basaglia and the anti-institutional psychiatric movement, was a place of segregation and coercion, a forced asylum for the poor, the outcasts, the marginalized, a brutalizing prison in which the sick were dehumanized and reduced in contention, deprived of rights and excluded from society, without a perspective of recovery and social reintegration. In 1969 Dying of class was released in bookstores: a photographic book edited by Franco Basaglia and Franca Ongaro, with photographs by Gianni Berengo Gardin and Carla Cerati, which unequivocally showed the world, thanks to the vivid crudeness of the images, what the condition of the mentally ill people inside mental hospitals, becoming a symbolic book that marked a fundamental stage in the process of liberation and dismantling of the mental hospital institution. For many years, Dying Class was unavailable in bookstores. Precisely this year, the Assayer has chosen to bring it back to light, in its integrity, respecting the original intentions of the curators and the intrinsically political nature of this project, because - we believe - mental illness is today as yesterday an expression of social injustice and of the inequalities that it produces: Basaglia's ideas, within the distortions of our society, now more than ever, are becoming a new utopia.
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