Parco Basaglia / Empathy

For the Centre of Mental Health (CSM), the artist researched the Archive of what used to be, in the past, the Provincial Psychiatric Hospital of Gorizia, associated with the pioneering work of Franco Basaglia. Recently reorganised, this archive allowed the artist to study the topic of traces, both documental and biological ones, left by memory. Fogarolli has thus created a site specific installation for Parco Basaglia, in which two fossil shells, belonging to a very distant geological age, are placed next to each other in order to symmetrically mime the morphology of the brain. As the result of a long process of evolution and as the location of thought and memory, the brain is metaphorically associated with the fossil millennial sedimentation of these Ostree bivalve, which in their positioning – not too close but still linked by a metallic element – try to understand and complement each other, still remaining two autonomous units, in a relationship that wants to be, as the title suggests, one of empathy.