“Le ragazze di Trieste”

 2008 Annalisa Cattani

temporary site specific installation, archive documents, sound installation, embroider cloth, with the names of some of the girls died in Trieste psychiatric hospital.

A pre-existing monument became the drive of the work. Too often monuments lose their function of manere and monere (staying and reminding) as the etymology of the term would mean, becoming backgrounds only for photos or points of reference for finding one’s bearings. In this case “The girls of Trieste”, monument to the women who sustained their men during the war by symbolically sewing the flag, become with the addition of an embroidered cloth with tens of names taken from the archives of the psychiatric hospital, the voice of the forgotten women deceased in mental hospitals, in memory of what happened and as a warning of that which should never happen again. Following Hauser point of view “when artistic portrayal is co-extensive with actual  and I would add with historical events, these deliberations may organize public memory in other than official terms, thereby shaping society’s understanding of its own historicity and  the model of its own self-organization” (Hauser 2005, p. 270).