Photographer: Anna Rose
It was less than a year after I was raped in Florence. Life had stopped, I had stopped, and I was unsure what my future relationship with art could ever possibly be. I came from a background in theatre, and somehow the artifice of that work felt jarring. The lie that points to the truth was no longer enough. I wanted truth. I still want truth. To inhabit it, as it moves like water, the way that truth does, embracing all that it passes. A friend brought me to Volterra, here, to the old psychiatric hospital that was closed after widespread protest across Italy decried the cruelty that happened within the walls of all such hospitals. I have Italian heritage, but grew up in Australia, where I spent my youth visiting loved ones held in more beautiful hospitals, places where I wished I could also stay. A place where there was permission to be broken, to be as you were. On this day, in the country of my father, I stood in a place to which no person would wish to be condemned. It is home now to the pigeons, to the insects and animals, with strange figures of men left there by some film or theatre company. The inhabitants. Abandoned lives in an abandoned place, standing in the sequins of my artificial life, knowing all is falling around me, waiting to see what of me will be left. Who will be born from these falling towers.