The city of disorder. Life stories from the San Lazzaro asylum. The title of this work by the musician Nicola Manzan should say everything, yet what does it say? That we can tell the psychic suffering of people avoiding reducing them to shreds of poems and novels, over-interpreting their experience or creating frames of meaning that are too definitive, to free them instead in a sound. Narrating “tied people” often means reducing, breaking into fragments, making certain lives dusty and “easy”. Sounding, on the other hand, can help to create flows that are more oriented to the pulse of life than to the inevitability of cutting. Avoid the effect to look for a movement, a possibility.
Born as part of a beautiful project of the Civic Museums of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, and designed for the Museum of the History of Psychiatry of Reggio Emilia, Manzan chooses eight people, five women and three men, once confined to the psychiatric hospital of San Lazzaro, closed with the law 180 of 1978, the Basaglia law, and tries to free them from the synthesis (however fascinating, also because here it ranges from the end of the nineteenth century to 1906) of their clinical reports. Manzan reads the medical records and chooses paths, escape routes with music that have room for melancholy and the low note as well as for the cheerful and primitive motif. On the dynamics of power between those who listen and those who tell their suffering, between those who observe and those who stir in their fury or paranoia, it has always been an art, but when the word is used it is easy for this power to crystallize. Music, as in this case, melts it.
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