The Guest | L’ospite (2014)

Since 1999, in Italy there are residential centers for palliative care, the hospices, healthcare facilities devoted to acceptance and care of terminally ill patients and their families.

Often located on the outskirts of urban areas, the hospice reply to an “architecture of transit”, where human life is welcomed, loved and guided towards hospitalized death.

The guest lives there, stays inside surrounded by light.

The guest can get some sunshine, sleep on a sofa, walk the dog, feel like at home. And the guest can also go away; but rarely does.

The guest has found his refuge within this clinical dimension of the boundary.

The Guest is a documentary project on hospices and on the relationships patients weave together inside. I crossed an interval, the one arisen between the clinical environment and the domestic dimension; an interval marked by intimate connections with the guests and their relatives, by reflections on the sacredness embracing the state of the places.

The sharing and the negotiation of the photographic procedures accompanied my research and directed my relationship with the guest’s slipperiness.