Lorenzo Castore: The Shooting as a Performance

Lorenzo Castore tells us about the unique experience of Sogno #5, a 3-day performance in the largest psychiatric hospital in southern Italy, then abandoned and forgotten. Using August Strindberg's A Day Dream as a pretext and the moving interpretation of a troupe of actors who were also psychiatric patients, he composed with a whole team a gripping photographic film that links individual and collective memories.

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Caroline Henry: How did you meet Irène Alison, whose family history is linked to Sogno #5?

Lorenzo Castore: I met Irene because of a book of interviews she invited me to participate in. Irene is a Napolitan editor, writer, journalist and photographer. Naples is a unique city, which has always been difficult for me to photograph even though I have always wanted to. It is fascinating, aggressive and very exposed to unbearable and limiting clichés. It is a more complex place than is easily and caricaturally often portrayed. So, with Irene we started talking about Naples and the desire to collaborate on a project to be done in the city. She told me about the former Leonardo Bianchi psychiatric hospital, an incredible structure of 220 000 square meters, now completely abandoned, which had long been the largest mental institution in Southern Italy. At first her idea was to propose that I photograph those spectacular abandoned spaces as I have done on several occasions for my work constantly in progress Ultimo Domicilio, but I wasn’t convinced, to me it seemed too easy, too cold and too photographic. After my first exploratory visit, chatting with Irene on the phone it turns out that her father's and her own story were connected to that place and to mental illness. She told me that her father was the psychotherapist who had disposed of the last psychiatric patients in the asylum; in addition to that, during her Naples years she had been involved in a theatre-therapy program with severe bipolar patients led by an experimental company of university students of which she was a member. The story thus became much more interesting for everyone because real life was bursting into the work and into those abandoned places. Irene was dealing with her origins, while I was dealing with a living matter made up of individual and collective memories: as I always try to do when I am drawn in a certain direction by instinct and emotion, I tried to dig inside that first sparkle of idea. From there we moved forward trying to figure out what to do and how to proceed. To do that we reassembled the theatre-therapy working group and all the preparatory research and in-depth work allowed us to reflect on the asylum institution, on madness, on small stories within a larger story... and then, magically - or so I perceived it - a work emerged that also deals with the bipolarity of emotional relationships. 

CH: We enter this film as if it were a mystery, with no word, apart from the also enigmatic title. You could have chosen a documentary approach to this subject, or developed the theatrical side with Strindberg's powerful text A Dream Play, but you stay with the present experience of the place and its confrontation with the actors. Why keep all this secret?

LC: Unconsciously I had clear ideas: I knew that this work had to be a film of fragments and I knew that I wanted to experience being with this group of people inside that empty absurd space. The shooting had to be experienced as a performance of which I had to be nothing more than a witness. I should have had no sense of responsibility, I was not to be a director but simply an observer. The decisions on what precise form to give the work came later. The hypothesis of total failure was very real and the feeling of insecurity that is generated in these cases is a powerful creative engine for me. Advancing in the dark makes the senses alert. Irene Alison and Giuseppe Stanziano handled the actors and the text, and I was free to become transparent and surrender to what was going on around me. The experience was really something, nothing like any form of performance that was in any boring way ‘professional’ or rationally meaningful. It was like flying on a wild horse. With these premises then the editing made the work take its shape, anarchically. The Strindberg piece is perfect for what we experienced in there together, but it was also a pretext. There are no intelligible words in the film and it cannot be traced back to Strindberg, but I certainly think it is interesting information to know afterwards, as it is not known that the actors are severe bipolar patients, and even this I think is better to know later. Everything is suspended and the fact that the film is a kind of roman-photo without words also contributes to the ambiguity of the narrative: the sequence of single images emphasises the mystery over the use of the moving image. Besides, talking about mental illness in a scientific and explanatory way did not interest me and I would have had no title to do so anyway. Moreover, I don't think I would have added anything to the wonderful works that already exist: I wanted to do it in a new way, I wanted to start from stories with names and surnames, questioning who and why we can define mad - a question to which I have no answer. In order not to give rise to prejudice, I wanted the information on the actors' medical records not to influence the viewer.

CH: Most of your photographic work has been in black and white. After the success of Paradiso in colour, you returned to black and white. Why colour in this project?

LC: I think the washed-out color I sought had to do with the dreamy atmosphere I was tending toward. Black and white would have been too unnecessarily harsh. I try to use the possibilities of the means of expression that I have at my disposal to put form at the service of content. The form has to be functional to the idea. Of course I don't always change for the sake of change, but each time I decide without protecting myself from the insecurity of failure or the petty thought of having to be recognizable. I want to believe that it is a specific energy that characterizes my work and not the use of color or black and white, a certain light or a certain kind of effect. So, whenever I want to develop a new idea I think as if it was the first work I have ever done, without preconceptions, without thinking about what 'my' photos should look like. I know photographers I respect who do this but it doesn't work for me. Sogno #5 is a work that has been echoed in a very minor key for what I believe to be its strength and its radical and experimental imprint, and this I hope at least confirms in practice that the utilitarian evaluation of the choice of mode and medium of expression just does not belong to me. That's kind of what happened, in reverse, when I stopped doing color for a while after Paradiso. It made my path perhaps less smart and easy, for sure more entangled and adventurous… I am not complaining at all, it was my decision.

CH: How long did you spend on this hospital?

LC: We did many months of preparatory work, but then we spent only three days in the hospital. Then I came back another time, but without the actors. This is also an atypical mode for me; I usually take years to complete a work. I don't have a way, nor do I want to have it.

CH: Your film has an incredible rhythm, mixing photography, video time and sound. In English, we use the same word ‘editing’ as well the choice of photos and as for the video composition. How did you work out this rhythm with Enrica Gatto?

LC: I had already worked with Enrica who is a very smart and open-minded editor with an innate sense of rhythm that she has nurtured and honed through her feature and documentary films editing experience. The editing rhythm is music without sound. I always sit by the editor's side throughout the editing process. I think the relationship with editors is crucial: there has to be mutual trust and continuous dialogue and above all the flexibility that allows you not to entrench yourself in your positions.

CH:  lot of work on the sound has been done. We can hear the space, some voices, music and noises. Who is behind this score?

LC: Emanuele de Raymondi is a brilliant composer and musician friend with whom I have had the privilege of working many times and in different directions. It is a great pleasure for me to work with him because he has all the talents that I do not have (and would like to have) and because we understand each other on the fly thanks to a fluid (and not always spoken) communication that has natural points of contact in a kindred sensibility. There's never any effort in understanding each other, it's always an organic relationship to the work we do together, never demeaned by ego issues or anything like that. I told him about the work and what I hoped to accomplish, and Emanuele came with me to Naples where he recorded every sound generated by the actors in the environment and by the environment itself. Those long corridors, those inner courtyards, those empty rooms are a sound engineer's toyland. Emanuele was a witness, as was I. Parallel to the visual editing was then the sound editing: sounds were sampled, broken down and reassembled. Everything heard in the film was recorded live during the three days of shooting, apart from the later addition of the very minimal piano.

 

CH: The characters are all actors and psychiatric patients. Their presence exudes strong emotion. Could you tell us about the exercises they did when shooting the film?

LC: As I said, the relationship with the actor-patients was much more in the charge of Irene, Peppe, and the managers of ASL 1 in Naples. They had known each other for years and shared a path together. After years they met again and reactivated relationships and an emotionally important modality for all of them, and it was right and natural that their communication in reference to theater and therapy did not include me. I did not want to impose my figure, there was no need. I did not want to create agitation by upsetting a chain of relationships based on delicate balances with an external intervention that might seem forced. I wanted to be transparent. During the filming Peppe Stanziano read passages from Strindberg and then left as much freedom and space as possible for the emotional reactions of Monica, Gaio, Tommaso and Enrico.

CH: Who chose Strindberg's text, whose spirit seems so strongly linked to this film?

LC: Peppe and Irene handled the whole part related to the theatrical action of the actors. They had the experience and skills. They knew best what text would be right to stimulate the patient-actors and reactivate their emotional and expressive channels. It would have been stupidly intellectual and pretentious to choose a text that worked for me only for philosophical speculation but would not have helped patient-actors involvement. My work has only benefited from Irene and Peppe’s knowledge and experience, and in retrospect I can say that the choice of Strindberg's The Dream was guessed on all possible levels of reading the work, both internally for those who worked on the film and externally for those who were spectators.

Interview conducted in January 2025
The photos are taken from the film Sogno #5
directed in 2013 by Lorenzo Castore