IL SANTO IL MATTO IL FIUME

Il Santo Il Matto Il Fiume is a project initiated within a broader research framework led by Cooperativa La Nuvola, a social enterprise operating in the province of Brescia in the fields of mental health and social care services. Developed between 2019 and 2022, the project spanned the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over this four-year period, the artist was commissioned to document the daily lives of residents and staff across the Cooperative's care facilities, all located along the banks of the Oglio River in the Brescia countryside.

The project aimed to create a vital testimony and a narrative of daily life within these services, sharing it with audiences unfamiliar with this powerful reality. For four years, the artist embedded herself within these care and residential communities for one week every month, seeking to build a shared memory that could reshape our collective perception of human vulnerability and caregiving. This journey looks both inward and outward, acknowledging that fragility is a universal human condition.

By engaging with care facilities and collaborating with staff, residents, and families, the artist translated this intense experience through the imaginative lens of photography, video, and drawing. Following initial site visits dedicated to observing and sketching natural light and volume, several residents began to record their own perceptions through drawings. The saturated colors and expressive mark-making on their pages inspired the artist to experiment with resensitized Lomo film color. Consequently, the entire photographic body of work mirrors the raw aesthetic of those drawings. A medium-format series (4.5x6 cm and 6x6 cm), exhibited alongside the original drawings created by the residents, forms the core of this artistic investigation.