From Mad in Portugal: In this haunting account of a community art project, Anthropologist and artist Adriana Santos Lopes describes entering the grounds of Hospital Júlio de Matos (a Portuguese psychiatric hospital) in February of 2025, as part of an artist residency organized by the collective +1masuno with Pavilhão 29. On her first day, waiting for colleagues, she looks for a bench (banco) to sit on — and finds it broken. Then another. And another. As she explores the hospital grounds, she starts cataloguing the broken benches like specimens: photographing them, noting their location and condition. She frames this half-jokingly as an ethnographic/artistic method and peppers the piece with unanswered questions: Who broke it? Did anyone notice? Does it still work? Should it?
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