In Hindsight

In 1873, during a cholera outbreack, Parma's mental hospital was temporarily moved to Colorno in the beautiful locations of the former villa of Maria Luisa d'Austria and the former convent of San Domenico, bordering the majestic Palazzo Ducale.

Over time this solution became permanent, up to the final closure following the Basaglia law of 13 May 1978.

From the beginning the site proved to be totally unsuitable, both because of serious structural deficiencies and because of the brutality of the treatment of patients.

The hospital was transformed to a kind of prison, with bars on windows and small, overflowed rooms where the insanes were locked up, tied and visually inspected, victims of all types of psychological and physical violences.

Soon the place became not just a residence for patients with psychiatric diseases, but also a sort of ghetto to segregate persons who were considered socially troublesome: drunks, vagabonds, prostitutes, orphans.

Once inside the asylum, patients were condamned to spend in that place the rest of their life, and were got definitively away from any contact with their families and the outside world, falling into the darkness and oblivion.

Only at the end of the 60’s, thanks to Mario Tommasini, it was possible to make public the asylum’s horrors, that few people really knew at that time. This helped the hospital to improve its conditions, until the final closure.

Today the hospital is completely abandoned and closed to the public, even so, it has been the theatre of incursions of gangs, vandals, vagabonds, but also meddlers, photographers and artists.

In particular, in July 2013 the brazilian internationally renowned artist Herbert Baglione entered without permission in the structure and realized his “1'000 Shadows” street art project.

Entering today in the hospital means to find ourselves in an place which still has strong emotions and memories, where claustrofobia's sensation is increased by long resembling and dark hallways, through which it’s easy to get lost.

Only few object from the past remain: wheelchairs, baby carriages, moldy clothes, dishes, medical records, empty medicine bottles.

Within the chipped walls we can still hear silence cries, shouts of hidden people refused from the world, that found in the hospital their home and normality.

This place is like a methaphor of the subconscious home, where ancient fear, ghosts, memories, wishes and objects continue to survive and appear even when we try to remove them, but they still live, in hindsight, together with our change.