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Introduction
The photographs on display are part of the Transitions project, a study of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation in Brazil and Chile carried out across historical ethnographic and transnational research. They have been brought together not as illustrations added after the fact but as material the research has generated and worked with directly: images found in archives, taken during fieldwork or collected from collaborators and partner institutions .
Because the project spans different countries periods and methods the images themselves are necessarily heterogeneous. Some come from psychiatric archives and academic journals documenting asylums in Chile and Brazil across the twentieth century. Others were taken during recent fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, recording Carnival parades organised by mental health services and user movements. Others still come from Trieste where fieldwork and archival research trace the Italian reform that influenced, and was later reworked by, Latin American experiences. This range of geographies and timeframes is intentional: deinstitutionalisation has never been a single, linear process, and the photographs reflect the multiple sites, decades, and forms of struggle through which it has actually taken place.
Working with images in this way matters beyond simple documentation. Historically photographs of psychiatric institutions were taken by clinicians, administrators, or the press and tended to fix madness within a fixed repertoire of images: the locked ward the uniform bed the passive patient. Many of the photographs gathered here by contrast were taken by social workers activists researchers and participants themselves often with the explicit aim of contesting that repertoire They show archival material being consulted rather than simply described; carnival parades in which patients, workers, and neighbours appear as protagonists rather than subj ects of observation; symbols such as the Marco Cavallo built in Trieste in 1973 and rebuilt in Rio in 2026 that travel across decades and continents and are re-elaborated each time they reappear. Art recurs throughout this material as one of the means through which deinstitutionalisation has actually been carried out: murals painted by patients, costumes and floats built collectively processions that move reform out of clinical settings and into public space. These practices have often done what biomedical language alone could not, opening a space in which people affected by psychiatric institutions could produce their own accounts of what had happened to them in their own terms
Displaying this material here also reflects a methodological choice made within the proj ect. Giving a different visual account of madness and of the reforms that have sought to transform its treatment is not incidental to the research: it has involved seeking out images produced by different hands in different settings often with different intentions than documentation alone and recognising art and visual practice as legitimate ways of knowing alongside clinical and academic accounts. The photographs are presented alongside the research discussed in today's symposium and as part of the same material the project has worked with throughout.
Marco Cavallo Across Time and Borders
This series follows the trajectory of Marco Cavallo, one of the most enduring symbols of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation, across two places and two historical moments. The first photograph shows Marco Cavallo in Trieste in 1973, shortly after the large blue horse, collectively built by patients, workers, artists and activists at the San Giovanni psychiatric hospital, crossed the asylum gates and entered the city. Conceived within the movement led by Franco Basaglia, Marco Cavallo became an emblem of the struggle against institutional confinement and of the possibility of imagining care beyond the asylum.
The second image depicts Marco Cavallo in Rio de Janeiro in 2026. More than fifty years after its appearance in Trieste, the horse re-emerged during the carnival bloco Tá Pirando, Pirado, Pirou!, leaving the grounds of the Hospital Psiquiátrico Philippe Pinel and entering the city's streets. Adorned with fitas do Bonfim and parading alongside references to Afro-Brazilian spiritual traditions, this version of Marco Cavallo does not simply reproduce an Italian symbol. Rather, it demonstrates how processes of psychiatric reform are translated, appropriated and reimagined within distinct social, political and cultural contexts.
The third photograph, When Carnival Becomes Care, captures the broader collective atmosphere surrounding the parade. Rather than treating carnival as a festive backdrop, the image points to its role as a public practice of care, participation and recognition. Here, psychiatric deinstitutionalisation appears not only as a matter of legislation or service organisation, but as a transformation of social relations enacted through music, performance, occupation of public space and collective presence.
Archival research
This series documents the research process itself, in Brazil, Chile, and Italy. The photographs show what archival work looks like in practice: the stack of issues of the Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria retrieved after requesting the collection at the library of the Faculdade de Saúde Pública, University of São Paulo. The second image displays the 1992 cover of the Revista de Psiquiatría Chilena (Chilean Journal of Psychiatry). The cover reproduces “Curación del Endemoniado” (The Healing of the Demoniac), a mural painted in 1906 by the prominent Chilean painter Pedro Lira. The original artwork was historically located inside the chapel of the Santiago Psychiatric Hospital (currently the Instituto Psiquiátrico Dr. José Horwitz Barak).
The third photograph is a document found in the Basaglia Archive, written by Luiz Cerqueira and presented in Rio in 1969, quoting Ulisses Pernambucano, a central though now lesser-known figure in the Brazilian hygienist movement. Its presence in Basaglia's own papers hinting at some contact, resistant or receptive, between the Italian movement and currents within Brazilian psychiatry not usually associated with reform. These images are included not as background, but as evidence of method, showing how the history of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation sit in material objects.
Life inside the asylum
This series brings together photographs taken inside psychiatric institutions in Chile and Brazil across the twentieth century. Two of them show the courtyard and a dormitory of the National Asylum in Santiago, photographed by social workers Diana Menchaca and Mirna Rojas, whose own captions noted the gap between an appearance of order and the conditions underneath: beds separated by gaps of barely half a metre, white bedspreads creating "an impression of cleanliness that does not, in fact, exist," while blankets were dirty and bed frames close to collapse. A third photograph, taken in 1940, records the inauguration of the Hospital-Colônia in Aracaju, during a congress on neurology, psychiatry, and mental hygiene that brought together figures such as Ulysses Pernambucano, Gilberto Freyre, and Luiz Cerqueira, a moment that marked the spread of psychiatric institutions, and of the ideas associated with Pernambucano's Escola do Recife, into Brazil's Northeast. Taken together, these images document the asylum as it organised daily life and as it presented itself publicly, before any of the reforms discussed elsewhere in the exhibition began to take hold.
Asylum Architecture
This series documents the buildings themselves: the Ospedale Psichiatrico in Gorizia, where Basaglia began his career and which today houses a 24-hour Centro di Salute Mentale and community-based activities carrying forward that legacy; the National Asylum in Santiago as it appeared around 1900 and as it appears today under its current name; and two institutions in Rio de Janeiro, the former Colônia Juliano Moreira and the psychiatric hospital Instituto Municipal Philippe Pinel.
The Colônia named after Juliano Moreira carries a history that complicates any simple reading of these buildings. Moreira, who directed Rio's Hospício Nacional de Alienados from 1903 to 1930, was among the first Black psychiatrists to gain recognition in Brazil and a prominent critic of the racial theories then dominant in psychiatry, which attributed mental illness and "degeneration" to Black ancestry. At the same time, he remained committed to the eugenic framework widespread among his contemporaries, locating the causes of degeneration instead in alcoholism, syphilis, and poor sanitary conditions. The colônia that bears his name is a reminder that the history of these institutions includes figures who cannot be placed simply on one side of a line between progress and harm.
Creative Deinstitutionalisation
This series turns to the role of art and theatre in psychiatric reform. Across the history of deinstitutionalisation, artistic practice has repeatedly given people with live experience, workers, and the public a way of acting together on the institution, outside clinical settings. In Chile, this includes a theatre group active inside the National Asylum in Santiago, documented in the film Locos del Alma (2003). In Rio de Janeiro, this continues every year through Carnival Collectives such as Loucura Suburbana, founded inside the Nise da Silveira Institute, and Tá Pirando, Pirado, Pirou!, which grew out of internal carnival dances at the Hospital Philippe Pinel into a parade beyond the hospital gates. These celebrations have turned festive occasions into year-round infrastructures of participation and recognition. In 2026, a rebuilt Marco Cavallo, adorned with fitas do Bonfim and accompanied by Iemanjá, passed through Pinel's gates inside the Tá Pirando parade, reworked within Afro-Brazilian histories of devotion and resistance.
In each case, art functions not as therapy in the clinical sense, but as a way of putting bodies, objects, and voices into a shared public space the asylum had kept apart, while generating new alliances between mental health professionals, activists and people with lived experiences.
Intersectionality of the struggles
These photographs were taken during the anti-asylum demonstration and the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro in 2026. They show banners and slogans carried together in the same marches: one documents SUS defended in the same demonstration as the anti-asylum cause; another shows solidarity with Palestine carried within it; a third, naming Franco and Franca Ongaro Basaglia beside feminist slogans, records a moment in which both were impersonated during the demonstration. Franco Basaglia was played by an actor whose father had been interned in a psychiatric institution, Franca Ongaro Basaglia played by a woman with lived experience of psychiatric care. The choice of performers placed the history being honoured in the hands of those who had lived its consequences most directly.
In Latin America, the fight against psychiatric institutions has often been bound up with the fight for democracy itself, emerging alongside resistance to dictatorship and the broader demand for rights denied under authoritarian rule. This history has kept the anti-asylum movement tied to social movements that today work on an internationalist, transformative register, organised around an explicitly intersectional understanding of oppression: the recognition of marginalised subjectivities (such as Black and Indigenous people, women affected by feminicide), the defence of public healthcare through the SUS, and solidarity with other processes of dispossession, such as the genocide in Palestine.
