Over 30 years after the Basaglia Law, mental health services in Italy are now widely integrated into the National Health System. On the ground floor of the complex of Santa Maria della Pietà, a former psychiatric hospital, the path of the Museum-Laboratory of the Mind, designed by Studio Azzurro in 2008, tells the story of the institution and the dynamics of asylums. No one is normal if seen up close is a preview of the core of the project for the second floor of the museum, a participatory environment that shows social representations of mental illness, discrimination and stigma through direct testimonies. The work was presented in November 2012 in a temporary location: the rooms of the Cencelli Library, in the main Pavilion of the Santa Maria della Pietà complex.

No one is normal if seen up close is a sensitive environment, an interactive space for listening to the testimonies of former inmates, relatives, doctors, operators, and nurses of the Santa Maria della Pietà psychiatric hospital, but also for deconstructing preconceptions about mental illness.

Visitors shall enter a room of the Cencelli Library, which hosts volumes dating back to the sixteenth century. Walking figures are projected on the long wall between the shelves; as in other works from the Story Bearers cycle, the visitor can choose to stop a character, touching it with his/her hand, and listen. The character will stop and speak a few words, a short sentence about him/herself, and if the visitor wants to hear his/her story, he or she can take him/her by the hand as far as the end of the wall to take him/her into the next room. There the character shall line up behind the other figures led by visitors and wait for his/her turn. This gesture of accompanying through physical contact establishes a personal dimension and relationship between visitor and character. Once the other figures have gone, the chosen character takes a seat on the other side of the room and, now in a more intimate condition, begins to recount his/her story. As they listen, visitors feel surprised as they realise that both the character’s appearance and the brief words they heard before made them mistake doctors for inmates. In so doing, they are forced to rethink about their own categories, the way they have easily judged, and their own considerations on mental illness.