Récits, mémoires et lieux de désinstitutionnalisation en Italie

Narratives, Memories, and Places of Deinstitutionalization. Towards a Cultural Atlas of the Overcoming of Italian Asylums

Call for Papers

edited by Giovanni Vito Distefano (Università di Cagliari); Davide Tabor (Università di Torino); Marica Setaro (Università di Pisa)

The history of psychiatric internment and deinstitutionalization is a story of relationships among memories, narratives, objects, geographical and architectural spaces. With the development of the asylum system the national territory was scattered with structures that, due to their size and intrinsic functional complexity, appear not just as simple buildings, but as “other” cities, connected with surrounding spaces by means of peculiar and often ambivalent relationships. Starting from these premises, the closure of mental asylums generated a new spatial “object”: the city of deinstitutionalization, composed by places inside and outside ex-asylum areas (still closed or open, repurposed or abandoned). This new city develops into a human geography of social experiences, personal histories and collective projects which, in the last sixty years have been alternating and
overlapping each other. The places of psychiatric internment thus persist, as “enduring heterotopias”, in many different outcomes, now joined by the new spaces of deinstituzionalization and re-institutionalization. The vital texture of the urban organism thus modified can be rebuilt through a census of the cultural objects it generated: narratives, memories, traces, developments, plans of the deinstitutionalization.

Psychiatric hospitals are not only places on the historical-geographical map, but they also occupy collective memories and cultural imagination: as scenarios of direct or indirect, real or imaginary experiences, as hypostases of philosophical, engineering and socio-political speculations, they are the subject of various forms of representation, re-elaboration, repression, connotative and symbolic stratification. Film and photographic documentation, oral testimonies, archives and design studies, fiction in any kind of media, from novels to films to videogames: the repertoire of cultural objects related to psychiatric hospitals and attesting how they are perceived, thought, evaluated, is quite impressive. Investigating this heritage of testimonies and representations is crucial in order to sketch the historical and cultural outline of asylum and ex-asylum places.

The volume Narratives, Memories, and Places of Deinstitutionalization. Towards a Cultural Atlas of the Overcoming of Italian Asylums aims to collect contributions from scholars who illuminate one or more points of this cultural atlas from different disciplinary perspectives. Proposals can include but are not limited to: literary, filmic and visual representations of the psychiatric hospital, including places inspired by historical reality and imaginary; memories and oral or written testimonies of psychiatric internment and deinstitutionalization; changes in therapeutic practices and the history of the material culture of deinstitutionalization; studies, debates, projects for the repurposing of spaces and of structures formerly used as asylums; institutional, private, and personal archives; photographic collections; artworks; games and videogames; temporary and permanent exhibitions; journalistic investigations; works of art and art collections.

The CfP is part of the 2022 PRIN “Narration and Care. The deinstitutionalization of the asylum system in Italy: history, imaginary, projectuality (from 1961 to today)” (https://sites.unica.it/narrazioneecura/).
Scholars who intend to contribute to the volume are asked, in addition to the essay, to prepare a brief summary sheet about one (or some) of the works, authors, events investigated in their research. Summary sheets must follow the same format of the examples attached to the CfP. They are aimed at making a census of cultural objects about the history of deinstitutionalization in Italy and they will be published on the PRIN project website.

The maximum length of contributions is 30,000 characters.

Scholars interested in participating are invited to contact the editors well in advance of the deadline and to submit title and abstract (max 1,000 characters) of their proposal by 30th July 2024.
 

Full proposals must be sent via email by 15th November 2024 to the editors of the volume
(giovanniv.distefano@unica.it; davide.tabor@unito.it; marica.setaro@gmail.com).

Proposals deemed suitable for publication will be peer-reviewed by anonymous referees.