Finding voices

The work on the Anna Maria Bruzzone archive

Abstract

The Anna Maria Bruzzone archive, donated in 2017 to the University of Siena, contains a vast range of materials: medical records, iconographic materials (photos, drawings and portraits), tape and video recordings, direct testimonies of the last years of activity of the mental hospital of Arezzo. Such an archive paves the way for different lines of research, two of which are outlined in this article. The first one is a linguistic analysis of the relationship between an original audio interview and its rendering in the Bruzzone’s book Ci chiamavano matti. The second one consists in tracing some of the hospital patients interviewed in 1977 by Bruzzone in order to collect a new testimony from them, starting from the listening of their old interviews