This project was born thanks to a very intimate collaboration between me and a close person to me, J, who has unfortunately been hospitalised in the psychiatric department.

I am sharing the story of a 23 y.o guy who passed the last two months in a psychiatry department, without the possibility to see anyone due to the COVID-19 emergency. The story of a lucid figure in an environment designed for insanity, who observes everything from distance but in turn is observed: subject and object, narrator and protagonist. My role in this project was to communicate his emotions and experiences: he allowed me to see reality through his own eyes, while I directed him from a distance on how to shoot these photos and worked on post-production to efficiently convey his feelings through these images. Nothing had been staged, authenticity was preserved: I did not want to sweeten nor romanticise, but rather to present everything from his point of view. He explained what his most vivid impressions about that place were, through some keywords: hypostimulation, sleepiness, detachment, stillness of time, dichotomy and the color green. Life in the hospital is bipolar itself: there are moments of mania, that cannot be captured through photos, in which there is only chaos, people coming and going, noises, and and moments of immobility, apathy, and melancholy. A torpid atmosphere envelops people and the environment. Not only is the colour green the main palette of the locals inside the hospital, but it also represents two polar opposites to J. The door that separates the psychiatry department from outdoors has a security system that signals a red light when the door is open and a green light when the door is closed. Green, therefore, represents a constraint, but it is also the colour that innately recalls nature: green becomes ambiguity.

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