BREAKING THE CIRCUIT OF CONTROL: INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST FRANCESCO BERTOCCO

BREAKING THE CIRCUIT OF CONTROL |

Interview with artist Francesco Bertocco about his work in the Project |
Prepared by: Tina Jazbec, Obalne galerije Piran.

Italian artist Francesco Bertocco and curators Mariagrazia Muscatello and Gabi Scardi traveled through Brazil in 2025 conducting field and archival research as part of the international art project Breaking the Circuit of Control.

The project explores the legacy of Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, with a focus on his visits to Brazil in 1978 and 1979. The artist and curators visited places in Brazil that Basaglia had visited and lectured at. In the late 1970s, the Italian psychiatrist visited several institutions, participated in conferences, and met with leading Brazilian experts. His visit triggered a major reform of the psychiatric system in Brazil.

1. Your project explores the legacy of the Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia in Brazil, where he travelled in 1978 and 1979. How did you decide to do this research and what does the title BREAKING THE CIRCUIT OF CONTROL tell us?

About two years ago, I began working on Basaglia's text Brazilian Conferences (Conferenze Brasiliane, Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milan 2000). The initial idea was to read the book as a film script or a text with a narrative structure, containing a description of the main issues related to his practices and theories, as well as a description of his travels through Brazil in the late 1970s, during the final stages of the dictatorship. From that moment on, I began to develop an idea that eventually became Breaking the Circuit of Control, a project comprising a film, a photographic installation, and a publication (which will bring together texts and material collected during the production of the work).

By the end of the 1970s, the anti-institutional movement started by Basaglia had already achieved remarkable results: the opening of Gorizia and Trieste¹, and a law that was about to be written, which would lead, for the first time, to the start of proceedings to close mental hospitals permanently².

Basaglia was one of the central figures in the broader anti-psychiatric movement, along with Foucault, Sartre, Laing, Goffman and Cooper. The decision to invite him to Brazil for the series of conferences stemmed from the need to radically renew and change the Brazilian mental health system and, more generally, the psychiatric system.

The entire project starts from a specific historical event: Basaglia's trip and the writing of the Brazilian Conferences; but is brought back into the dynamics of the present: the transformation of places through reform processes, the archaeologisation of remaining structures, and the evolution of anti-psychiatric movements.

2. In the preparation of the project, you described that you would photographically document the spaces, architectures and other material remains in the places where Basaglia worked in Brazil. What did you plan before you went to Brazil, how did you choose the places to visit? Can we still find traces of Basaglia there?

The first stage of the project was to identify the places associated with Basaglia, those where we were certain to find traces and were sure of their existence. Many of these places, such as the Sadea Sapiente and the Teatro de Cultura Artística in São Paulo, still exist. Others, however, are not specified, have been modified or rebuilt, partly because their use was temporary.

Once this mapping was complete – mainly with the aim of facilitating the logistics of our travels – we moved away from the philological dimension of places and attempted to create a new toponymy. This was based on data from art and archive collections created within psychiatric hospitals (I am referring to the two best known: the collection of Dr. Osório César in Juquery and the collection of Nise da Silveira in Rio de Janeiro), data on demonstrations by the anti-psychiatry movement, and testimonies about events from the Basaglia period (and their impact), which have radically changed the Brazilian psychiatric landscape in recent years.

3. The second part of the project will be a video installation. In the photographic work you have chosen to highlight the message of the architectural remains of former psychiatric institutions with their repressive history. The video, on the other hand, will represent democratisation as the core of Basaglia's reform in the treatment of psychiatric patients. How was the preparation of the video and what kind of interlocutors did you get in Brazil?

For this part of the project, I decided to work on the questions that were asked to Basaglia during conferences by health professionals and, at certain points during his journey, also by students – not only medical students – and by all those interested in the issues addressed in his speeches. In the Brazilian Conferences, most of the text consists of the transcription of this “dialogue” between Basaglia and the audience.

There are reflections on the condition of patients in mental hospitals, on the need for a change in patient policy, on work in hospitals, on the roles of health professionals (such as nurses), on the social conditions of patients, and on the need to consider mental illness as part of a broader problem involving class, ethnicity and segregation.

The video begins with questions that arise in the context of Basaglia's speeches or complement them. The questions are sometimes posed directly: they question the symbolic Basaglia in his role as representative of a broader movement, expressed in different personalities that are not always in harmony; and the real Basaglia as a person who succeeded in dismantling the existence of asylum institutions – or who, at least in the Italian context, came closest to doing so.

This is where my reenactment begins.

4. In some of your previous projects, you have already dealt with the history of medicine in relation to other aspects of society, or with medicine as a mirror of deeper social structures. What attracts you to this topic and how is it relevant in today's global society?

One of my previous works, Historia (Bertocco F. et al.: Historia, Mousse Pubblishing, 2021), stems from a broader reflection on the political and social consequences of healthcare (in this specific case in Chile), which my work has begun to focus on in recent years. In my previous works, I was interested in the “medical context": from the laboratory, which we perceive as a complex system in which processes take place and relationships are established, to the hospital, where we share a collective medical experience, and finally to the therapeutic environment, which reflects the internal dynamics of therapeutic processes.

5. What do you see as the greatest relevance and importance of Basaglia's work today?

The disappearance of mental hospitals, in their sense as coercive physical structures, absolute and all-encompassing institutions, represented part of the structural changes to the psychiatric system, whose long shadows stem from the dehumanised and positivist approach to treatment.The ideological vision of treatment led to the objectification of the patient and medicalization, which reduced illness to a three-dimensional, easily measurable, and seemingly incurable element. These approaches, with their cancerous violence, shaped the image of the mentally ill person.

I don't believe that the question of the place of mentally ill people in society is reserved exclusively for experts. In fact, it places us all in a problematic perspective from which we cannot escape. It can happen in any family, it can happen at any stage of our lives, perhaps at the most vulnerable and unexpected. Mental illness takes various forms and intensities: from the microcosm of personal dissatisfaction and our own vulnerability to the role of a psychiatric patient (colloquially and pejoratively referred to as a “madman") who requires institutional intervention.

We believe that the psychiatric reform bearing Basaglia's name still contains instruments of coercion, such as compulsory treatment, to which he himself had serious reservations. Basaglia's message does not only concern psychiatry in the narrow sense, but today, with the same intensity, represents a tool for preventing the recurrence of illness, social segregation, and class differences that reflect the economic model in which we live. In other words, his thinking is still a relevant tool for preventing abuse by public or private institutions, or abuse that arises as a result of personal action.

Given the importance of Basaglia's legacy in Brazil, we wonder what else we can learn from his theories and actions. In Italy, the name Basaglia still carries strong political connotations, which limits the possibility of implementing his ideas and their actual presence in contemporary debate. For many, Basaglia is still “the man who closed the psychiatric hospitals." Last year marked the centenary of his birth. Many events were organized in his memory, and numerous publications, essays, and in-depth studies were released on the work that Franco and Franca Basaglia³ accomplished during those intense years.

It is hoped that all this will bring his thinking back to the forefront, reshaping his figure in the present day, stripped of ideological preconceptions, which are often superficial and mostly inaccurate.

Project Breaking the Circuit of Control by artist Francesco Bertocco is supported by the 13th edition of Italian Council, an international programme supporting contemporary Italian creativity run by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture of Republic of Italy.

The project will be presented on the occasion of Francesco Bertocco’s solo exhibition, which will take place at the Loggia Gallery in Koper. The opening of the exhibition, curated by Gabi Scardi and Mariagrazia Muscatllo, is planned on June, XY at 7:00 PM.

Notes –

1- Franco Basaglia worked at the Psychiatric Hospital in Gorizia from 1961 to 1970 and at the Psychiatric Hospital in Trieste from 1971 to 1979. These were the first two institutions in which he implemented the changes that led to the reforms of psychiatric treatment in Italy.

2- Basaglia Law or Law 180 (Legge Basaglia, Legge 180) is the Italian Mental Health Act of 1978 which signified a large reform of the psychiatric system in Italy.

3- Franca Ongaro Basaglia (1928–2005), activist and politician; wife, supporter, and collaborator of Franco Basaglia.