The Festival dei Matti, held in Venice since 2009, has become a platform for radically rethinking society’s relationship to mental health, care, and marginalization. Its mission is to bring the theme of “madness” back into the public space—beyond the boundaries of medical discourse. A public program of discussions, lectures, and art projects exploring two key questions: What could spaces of care look like? And what would spaces of anti-care look like?
These two collective art projects—conceived as visual manifestos—reflect, on one hand, the hopes and desires of the festival’s participants, and on the other, what they would want to reject: a vision of care turned dystopian.
Yesterday marked the first day of the Assemblies.
The group working on the desired project explored ideas for integrating everything necessary for the reproduction of life into a single network: from food production to knowledge sharing, from healthcare as a built-in part of community life to the collective growing of flowers and decorating of shared living spaces.
Surprisingly, the group focused on anti-utopia described a near-existing reality—marked by privatization, alienation, mechanization, automation, and the “efficiency” of both the healthcare system and everyday life.
As one participant put it:
“When you enter a hospital, you become part of a factory system that processes you through it.”