Isabella Lanave

Visual artist / photographer / director of photography

Fatima for CatchLight

During the years I have been do...ogical explanations.

During the years I have been doing this work, I have been thinking a lot about the difficulty in accepting a mental disorder. For the person who suffers, the family and society. Perhaps, if we begin to understand that the causes of a disorder come from biological, psychological and socio-cultural issues, we can begin to accept the lack of logical explanations.

Mental illnesses affect more th...rsquo;s neurodiverse imaginary.

Mental illnesses affect more than 86% of Brazilian people. Even with this large number, the effort to make and implement public politicies on the issue of mental health is insufficient. This is a consequence of years of lack of knowledge and awareness that maintain the stigma on the theme.
Fatima is a long-term project about my daily process of accessing my mother’s neurodiverse imaginary.

That’s the only pictu...use she was adopted.

That’s the only picture in my grandmother’s living room showing her children. Fatima is not there because she was adopted.

The number of families who live...l spend my whole life doing it.

The number of families who live with people neurodiverse and have access to initiatives to learn how to deal and what to do during a crisis is very small. In my personal experience, I can say that I am still learning this and maybe I will spend my whole life doing it.

The desires of not living in th...o find our places in the world.

The desires of not living in this territory anymore and the difficult memories of memories of the past led my mother to be hospitalized numerous times in psychiatric hospitals. At each exit, one more diagnosis for your madness. Since adolescence, I have been trying to find reasons to justify how she feels. More recently, we have been walking together towards an acceptance process, linked to our quest to find our places in the world.

A mattress in an abandoned buil...alized in a psychiatric clinic?

A mattress in an abandoned building. How are the feelings to be hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic?

Fatima laying on the sofa in my...’s uterus”.

Fatima laying on the sofa in my house in 2017. The first time I had to take responsibility for my mother’s psychiatric hospitalization. During her crisis, my reaction had always been to step away. Laying on my sofa she told me: “I want to go back to my mom’s uterus”.

Our family.

When I was 10 my mother was dia...rvive in this world.

When I was 10 my mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, after a postpartum depression of my younger brother’s pregnancy. Like all of us, but in different nevels, she has been trying to find a way to survive in this world.

Fatima’s hands. My mo...n is a kind of therapy for her.

Fatima’s hands. My mother is in a never-ending reconstruction of her mind. To take care of the garden is a kind of therapy for her.

My mother lives on the seaside ...n the water with us.

My mother lives on the seaside today., Whenever she wants to calm down, she goes to look at the sea. But always with some distance, because she is afraid of the water. In this day, my stepfather was helping her to stay in the water with us.

My mother and my brother. My br...hen we were in a high building.

My mother and my brother. My brother and I talk too little about our mother and sometimes I get worried about him. “Would it hurt to fall down from here?” he asked me one day when we were in a high building.

Clouds on the sky. My mother ha...’t my sky.”

Clouds on the sky. My mother has been hospitalized six times. While there she always wrote texts or poems. Recently, I found a piece of paper written on it, “Today there are black clouds in the sky, in the sky, because it isn’t my sky.”

How do sisters grow up who had ...ifferent families and contexts.

How do sisters grow up who had their mother killed as a child? After my maternal grandmother’s accident, my mother was adopted by a new family. In the picture, she’s with her biological sisters. They all grew up in different families and contexts.

I value the importance of raisi...port from the state or society.

I value the importance of raising awareness of relatives of individuals who suffer from a mental illness, because when in my family we understood that my mother was not alone in her suffering, we got more positive results in our interaction. but it it is not easy, even when we do not have support from the state or society.