Claudia Virginia Vitari
PANOPTICON

Description

The volume documents the retrospective exhibition “Panopticon”, by the artist Claudia Virginia Vitari, set up at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
This catalogue is a study on the concept of “total institutions” that the artist, born in Turin and living in Berlin, has been researching for almost two decades.
The title refers to Jeremy Bentham’s concept of an ideal prison, where a guard, placed in a central control tower, can observe all the inmates without their knowledge. This system of control reflects the conditions of people residing inside “total institutions”, a term developed by Erving Goffman to indicate places where individuals are isolated from interactions with the outside society and their daily activities are strictly regulated by a central authority.
Vitari’s experimentation with materials responds to the need to find new tools of communication. The use of glass makes this process transparent but at the same time complex and layered, while the silkscreen technique allows for the incorporation of the stories and portraits of those who live within total institutions. The glass objects are embedded in iron structures, a cold and rigid material that symbolizes institutional inflexibility and the attempt to keep individuals detached from society. Social tensions are fixed in glass and exposed as a brutal social experiment. Through large-scale installations that border on the performative act, the exhibition “Panopticon” aims to give visibility to marginalized, almost invisible people. Vitari’s ethnographic, psychological and sociological research, conducted through the study of scientific literature, has allowed her to frame these issues. The artist then spent years talking to people at risk of exclusion to better understand issues related to mental health, incarceration and migration flows.