Art as a communication tool to rethink the city of health

The proposed theme concerns the former Sant’Osvaldo asylum in Udine. Inaugurated in 1904 as an intern- ment facility for people with mental disorders, it presents the typical structure of psychiatric hospitals of the time, where the architecture, in its construction of the limits and internal structures of these places, recounts forms of ritualised and bureaucratised living, defined by rigid codes of behaviour and spatially defined. From a small foundation town born in an isolated context, it is now an integral part of the city’s spaces and dynamics. After years of partial abandonment, the health authority has begun a process of rethinking the area through a research agreement involving the University of Udine, to try to imagine new scenarios for the area’s redevelopment. There are many forms through which the research activity is carried out: round tables with the contribution of local stakeholders, teaching activities within the Design Laboratories, degree theses, and design workshops. Sant’Osvaldo represents one of the cases in which an attempt is being made to put the vestiges of the twentieth century back into circulation: hospitals, slaughterhouses, asylums, bar- racks, sanatoriums, factories are among the types of artefacts that gave structure, form and ‘modernity’ to the city at the end of the nineteenth century and move into the twentieth, and today stand as available and complex materials to be reused. Art becomes a priority tool to communicate the regeneration process that is underway and to support a project that triggers new forms of living, freeing these spaces from the stigma of remote misery, before time consumes them.