Paths of Expression

21/06/2020

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The origin of these photos:

A friend of mine – about two years ago - was talking about her troubles working as a professor in an afterschool classroom of 12years old students: they came from different schools to do their homework, and barely knew each other.

As months went on, the usual dynamics of group behavior in schools everywhere were generating troubles; contrasts between the inhibited and the uninhibited, males and girls, swots and scholars, were only some of the difficulties. So, I suggested to the school and to the group of parents a project based on video and Self-image, proposing sessions of two hours every fortnight; during the sessions we would experiment with different techniques, all aimed to deeper and shared relationships among the students. This was to be accomplished through creative and introspective procedures, all centered on seeing oneself on a video monitor, with the help of a videocamera.

All this had been developed by me during two decades of work, mainly in a psychiatric and rehabilitative basis, but it seemed to me even more interesting during the Selfie era, when interest about oneself’s image is more openly accepted an declared.

I introduced (1) Videoconfrontation (the participant sits in front of one’s face in video, answering to some questions about what hits him in the image), (2) Psyvideoclip (shot of 3 minutes, where everybody had to perform some duties: “Enter the camera’s point of view and do everything you want”, “Enter the camera’s point of view and show a part of you”, “Enter the camera’s point of view and show a dream”; all this had to be performed while silent), (3) Videogenealogy (bringing some photo’s of one’s life and seeing and describing them to others).

After these steps we could get to see and describe together everybody’ (4) selfiesand the evolution of these in time. As a last step, we had the (5) Family Video-Interview, based on a protocol of questions elaborated together, meant to explore the quality and depth of relationships inside the family.

All this had to be performed by all the students in the class, and it was seen together in the second part of the session, stimulating impressions and discussion.

The aim of this group was to develop a sense of belonging and sharing through a common experience centered on the Self and the others.

We had about ten sessions, with mixed results, but it is important that everyone accepted to come back to the group, showing curiosity and interest to perform in what one of the boys called “The identity group”.

It is important to underline that families were skeptical about this project (the overall reaction was: “All right Doctor, but they must do their homework!”).

18/02/2020

The new website www.psichiatradavidemanghi is now working!

30/01/2020

An interesting interview with master saxophone player Pharoah Sanders was on the New Yorker, two weeks ago. Now 80, he is still playing and surprising us, after having shared the 'new thing' experience with John Coltrane. In this interview I found something close to the theme of my reflections on expression. Asked by the journalist about what he listens to these days, he says:"I listen to things that maybe some guys don't. I listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off". This answer tells us of the sound of things coming to us, of the deep music of the universe. Great.

13/01/2020

As a long time and loyal follower of The Who I was quite dubious when I heard a new album (simply titled "WHO") was coming our way.
Having bought it (on vynil!) I think it is a great album, not only for the music or the words, but because the band has accepted to change. This album tells the story of an aged man (Pete Townshend is 75) aware of what he was and of what he has become, and that is still curious. We see no melancholy (as we saw Springsteen on "Western Stars"), no pathetic reproducing old styles or themes (like the Rolling Stones have done for decades), but just two men, Pete and Roger Daltrey, that accept to give a look around them and to find a way to express themselves (no matter if the voice has changed, or the style has softened, everyone of us did), always staying alive, and, after many months, I find again the desire to put a new album on the record player.
This album is a great step for the man who hoped to die before he got old!

09/06/2019

While visiting the Napoleonic Villa on the Isola d'Elba, I came to know that this particular kind of mirror was called "Psiche". This name has mythological origins, deriving from the myth of Amor and Psyche. It includes, as we can see, the whole body image. In our culture this can give a strong suggestion about the complexity and the labyrinthic implications of seeing oneself, close to the video techniques I adopt in my work.

16/05/2019

In a small beautiful bookshop in Milan, last Monday, we met Matt Salinger, the 66 years old son of J D Salinger, the most revered author of The catcher in the rye (1952). Matt is in Italy to talk about his rediscovery and publishing of his father's opus (composed mainly by tales and novellas, it seems). It is well known that Salinger practically never appeared in public for many decades, never gave interviews, or accepted to be photographed. All this happened for many reasons, probably most of them personal, but also because of his absolute respect of the reader, and to avoid any kind of influence on him and his interpretations of what he was reading. This is the reason why he always wanted the cover of his books (at least in the Italian Edition) white; for the same reason, he never wanted a film version of his writings. "The only possible movie - said Matt citing his father - is the one in the head of the reader". This made me think to the last Table in TAT (Thematic Apperception Test), the well known psychological test. In this test, the subject receives different Tables, each of them carrying a drawing of a scene or an interaction, and is invited to describe what he thinks is happening in that scene. The last Table is white, and one has to describe what he sees in it. I always found this Table extremely interesting, and stimulating, and the same seems to be to happen every time, using the white surface as a sort of a probe to one's inner world and impressions. Discovering that a great writer gave a similar meaning to the act of reading, respecting the individuality and the originality of the reader, has been for me a nice surprise. The gift of a white surface as the pathway to attention and listening.

08/03/2018

Few days ago Gillo Dorfles, a great critic ald philosopher of art and modern Times (and, besides that, a psychiatrist in his young years), died at the respectaable age of 107. I found this Photo of Gillo, who wrote on his portrait: Non mi riconosco, I don’t recognise myself. Like in video techniques of seeing oneself, he searched for a trace of himself in the devastazione of time. Goodbye Gillo

03/03/2018

01/03/2018

John Cale, The Danceteria, New York City, 1981

01/03/2018

The training Course "The person who is me,. Seeing oneself in the digital world" has come to the end, with a whole weekend dedicated to videointerviews. Mothers, daughters and a nephew have been involved in dialogues and tales of the past and the future. Woirking together, we have explored techniques and feelings centered on seeing oneself, building a challenging confrontation between Ideal and Real. The Group will go on, with a less intensive rhythm of work, encouraging direct experiences in using video by the participants.

05/11/2017

Second session in the training Course:"The person who is me. Seeing oneself in the digital world", in Milan. Today nice work on psyvideoclip.

25/03/2017

The history of rock and roll has been also the history of great photographs. For many of us, mainly this side of the Ocean, record covers, or pictures from Rolling Stone magazine, were vehicle of information and phantasies. This too shaped a generation.

As a staff photographer for Columbia Records, Mr. Hunstein shot Bob Dylan, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and many others.

13/09/2016

http://www.davidemanghi.com/en/notizie/talk-to-your-face.html

Here is the link to an article i wrote about using video with adolescent students, presented at a Tavistock Clinic Conference, in 2005.

 This is the text of a Communication made in 2005 in Paris at a Tavistock Clinic Conference. You can download the entire document!

24/05/2016

Bob Dylan, 75. Happy birthday!!

07/02/2016

Jefferson Airplane original members Paul Kantner and Signe Anderson died on the same day. This seems a peculiar and surprising coincidence, after they had been quite far away from the music scene and, I guess, from each other. Bond together because of their common experience, they took off together, like they did in 1966 ("Jefferson Airplane takes off", their first album).

10/01/2016

The photo below was shot by Olwyn Hughes to her brother Ted, one of the greatest modern English poets. Its peculiar point of view and the architecture of the image encompass brilliantly the condition of being object and being subject of the photography, an aspect I have studied and practiced extensively in my clinical work. Seeing oneself, on video or in a photo, a person sees how others see him/her , being at the same time the one who sees and the one who is seen. The idealized, internal, image of self is confronted by the real image, the one others see. This allows emotions to be elicited and expressed, in a tolerant and encouraging setting.

10/01/2016

Literary agent with a fearsome reputation who was devoted to the work of her brother, Ted Hughes, and the posthumous literary life of his wife Sylvia Plath

23/12/2015

If The leftovers 1 was about loss and how to manage the grieving, series 2 is more about reparation. It doesn't give all the answers , but the monumental ending of the last episode left me with a sense of relief and peace. I felt satisfied.

08/11/2015

Theory and Practice of the VideoGroup People's curiosity about themselves ("Who am I?", "How am I?", "Who do I look like?") is...

11/10/2015

I found in "Doctor Zhivago" (1956) a great definition of the need to create and to find a way to express. Following a funeral, Zhivago "would dream and think, labor on the shapes, create beauty. More than ever, it was clear to him that art is always and ceaselessly dominated by a twofold reason: a tireless meditation on death, from which it creates life".

04/09/2015

David Hockney again (2): Hockney has been, and still is, a restless and original experimenter. To accept innovation and technical progress is to accept life and its closeness to reality and art, rather than keeping stuck to a technique or to a style. During the '70s he used the Polaroid camera to create wide pictures where subjects resulted fragmented and split, in this way remote and incomplete, lacking unity but showing a new and unsuspected intensity. He worked a lot, not casually, on his mothers' image; her lack of expression, possibly brought by her Northern origins, still hits me. The split images transmit, as in Cubism, the impossibility to grasp a feeling, the absence of a definition and maybe of her love. Hockney seemed concentrated of the burden of death, particularly by that of his mother: he put her in a ruined abbey, a desolate and lifeless landscape, under the rain. The sense of loss and of loneliness is enhanced by the technique he chose.

09/08/2015

I always appreciated, in David Hockney's work, the particular care to selfportait, the will to give attention to his own times, the untiring adoption of "modern" and innovative tools ( the Polaroid camera, iPhone, iPad). I always came out from his exhibitions revitalized and, so to say, awakened. "My Parents", 1977, is a strong representation of characters and relationships: a mother staring, motionless and emotionless, at the painter son, a father lost in his interests. In the small mirror, Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ gives us maybe the trace of a destiny.

14/06/2015

Ornette Coleman
For his expressive force and bravery, Ornette Coleman, dead a few days ago at 85, was certainly a great man. He created a style, subverted nearly all jazz rules, creating free jazz. His voice came from an America we were trying to discover, it was not sorrowful or rabid and resentful (like for instance John Coltrane’s was) , but it was at the end happy and satisfied. In his music you couldn’t find ghetto or slavery traces, there was lightness, will to search and to be searched. Not casually, I think I see now, the box of his records on Atlantic is called “Beauty is a rare thing”.
Buying a Coleman record required a certain amount of courage, was sometimes a masochistic act, but you knew it had to be done. Listening, still today, to “Free Jazz”, looking at the Jackson Pollock’s painting on the cover, is a moment of education: it had in itself something indelible, something contemporary.
I remember, in 1975, his legendary concert in one of the Psychiatric Hospitals near Milan, on the eve of closure thanks to the new law; it was the 25th of April, anniversary of the Liberation from Fascism and Na**sm in Italy: so, we celebrated different kinds of freedom, from oppression, from illness and exclusion, from the strict rules of melody. A few days later, I was at a concert of Ornette in an Art Gallery in Milan, I shook his hands and took a photo of his saxophone.
The Guardian, in the obituary, cites Ornette:” I’m not trying to prove anything to anybody. I just want to be as human as possible”.

19/04/2015

Milan was last week, during the Design Week and the Furniture Salone, an endless path of expression. In a multitude of places - art galleries, ateliers, old churches, ...- a myriad of projects and realizations was showed to everybody. It gave a strong impression of life and vitality, of creativity. Walking in the streets, full of people from allover the world, gave great hope.

13/04/2015

Fourteen years after the Spanish artist’s death, a retrospective of his dramatic installations, full of strange grey figures, shows he’s still toying with us

31/03/2015

http://www.petsandthecity.it/articoli/i_venerdi_di_connor_all_ospedale_dei_bambini.html

La Pet therapy è per molti ancora qualcosa di vago e di poco definito. Un trattamento che mette a contatto delle persone malate, o in condizioni di debolezza psichica, con degli animali allo...

25/03/2015

http://www.davidemanghi.com/it/blog/examplepage152015/
Here you can find a post about Albert Maysles, an important American documentary maker, dead a few days ago. It's in Italian, but I hope everybody can manage.

La mai banale pagina dei necrologi del Guardian riportava lunedì scorso la notizia della scomparsa di Albert Maysles, avvenuta il 5 marzo. Maysles era un filmmaker vicino al movimento del cinéma veritè francese, o al kino-pravda sovietico. Leggendo la sua biografia ho colto nella sua traiettoria esp…

15/03/2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiZezAjaVI4&feature=share

Albert Maysles died at the beginning of March. This brief documentary, seen today, is certainly naif, set deep into the Cold War climate. It is interesting, anyhow, how the Author tries to understand the process of mental illness, of how persons, "having lost the introspection, typical of the Russian people", could develop a malaise or an illness.
Many years later (1970), Maysles eventually directed "Gimme shelter", the chronicle of the infamous tragic Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, CA. Seen today, on youtube, that was certainly another moment introspection was lost.

Albert Maysles first documentary Psychiatry in Russia completed in 1955. Although he is best known for his work in direct cinema, Albert did not begin his ca...