from Giacomo Doni’s website
34 years. That’s the age she was Lia Traverso when he died in a mental hospital from a “Great Fever”.
34 years, 12410 days: old enough to set up a revolution that has remained indelible in the memory.
The psychiatric hospital destroys the identity of this young girl day after day; she emotionally destroyed pours all her thoughts, her anger, her instincts into a diary of hers through texts and drawings. Days marked by the same rhythms between work, dinner, solitude, alienation.
And all driven by the fear of “dangerous to himself and others”: shoes without laces and dinners without fork and knife.
It could be dangerous to handle the knife at dinner, they told her.
The fork is dangerous, they kept telling her.
But Lia didn’t agree.
Massaging days for the soul that seemed to never end, where meals were yet another jab to definitively destroy the shell of our humanity. Eating meat with a spoon is impossible, as well as surreal and frustrating.
During work shifts he had to handle scissors and mallets, tools far more dangerous than a knife or a simple fork, and he didn’t understand why he had to use a spoon to do everything at dinner.
It can be dangerous to handle a knife at dinner, they kept telling her. But one day Lia said enough.
During a dinner he began his protest: a non-violent hunger strike to demand the addition of cutlery. A protest that soon went viral. Because all Revolutions are contagious.
A struggle of silences to reclaim a simple fork, an elementary and banal instrument that we hold in our hands every day but which shows us how distant the mental hospital world was from what was beyond the walls.
But in the end Lia won the battle. Thanks to Lia, other cutlery was also introduced, thus collapsing another small piece of difference with the outside world.
34 years. This is the age Lia Traverso was when she died in a mental hospital from a “Great Fever”.
34 years old, an age of struggle in search of a humanization that seemed incredibly distant.
Because in the end normality is nothing more than a revolution that has stopped surprising.
To know more
Lia Traverso – Everywhere closed it feels bad.
The story of Lia Traverso has a permanent space at Laboratory of the Mind Museum