A new, intense project completed by the students of the Level II Specialisation Course in Art for Therapy at the Academy of Fine Arts. “Io visto da te, io visto da me; tu visto da te, tu visto da me” is the title of the workshop led by Gea Casolaro, one of the most acclaimed Italian mid-generation artists, known for her careful and sensitive work expressed in a social, anthropological and international key, nourished by travel, field research and personal narratives.
Casolaro worked with fourteen people who attend the Day Centre of the Mental Health Centre, at the ASL Roma 1 in Via di Monte Tomatico, and with ten students, who were called upon to assist her and manage the creative processes, group dynamics and relationship paths with her, with the collaboration of Nicoletta Agostini (Course Coordinator) and the supervision of Maria Jacomini.
The objective, explains the artist, “was to encourage students and participants to step out of themselves and move towards others, through the repetition of a mechanism of representation and self-representation”. Everyone, working in pairs or in groups, interacted with each other to create unconventional portraits and self-portraits, based on careful and constant dialogue. “Representing oneself and the other – adds Casolaro – by means of an everyday object, an animal, a monument or a work of art, allowed us to compare the image we have of ourselves with the image that the other has of us, to verify the extent to which our inner perception and that of an external view may or may not coincide.”.
The result of this experience is contained in a corpus of fantastic portraits, somewhat Dadaist and very poetic, exhibited between 28 June and 9 July 2018 in the Colleoni Hall of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
In the year that celebrates the 40th anniversary of Law 180 – the “Basaglia Law” that put an end to Italian asylums – the workshop and exhibition represent a valuable contribution, in terms of training and research, from the academic institution, which is useful for acquiring professional skills in the field of Art Therapy.
“’Entering outside, exiting inside’ is a phrase attributed to Franco Basaglia,” explains Nicoletta Agostini, “a phrase that ‘summarised the need to ‘exit inside’ from the facilities built as prisons for the mentally ill and to enter outside into the space of life’.” And if an Academy of Fine Arts “has the task of preparing its students to face reality creatively – it must also, on similar occasions – “‘enter outside’ to ‘exit inside’ a better understanding, and accept meeting the other, in their manifold diversity and richness, capable of generating change”.
And Gea Casolaro also quotes the great psychiatrist Franco Basaglia: “Up close, no one is normal,” she says at one point in front of the camera, during the filming that documents the workshop. The delicate work of reflection and engagement on the theme of representation started right there. That feeling of discovery, acceptance and processing of difference, as the foundation of every hypothesis of identity: the close-up gaze is the gaze of stripping bare and of the elsewhere. Where the ego exchanges itself with the other, over and over again, rewriting itself from scratch.
The video and the story of the project are available on ARTRIBUNE.