MELISSA IANNIELLO
That Month

“That Month” is a subjective journey, unpublished, into an Italian psychiatric clinic where I was hospitalized as a patient in 2020 due to bipolar disorder that I suffer from. Through visual metaphors, I invite you into the universe I experienced.
The ambulance ride - that I can barely remember. But that month inside, how to forget it: hospitalized for the first time in a psychiatric clinic. Diagnosis: depression due to bipolar disorder. Bars on the windows. Two people per room. White coats. Everything so aseptic. Am I still capable of feeling emotions? A pill to stabilize me, an injection to calm me down. A swing of medications. Doctors and nurses are there to care for me and help me but in the meantime I cancel myself out. I annihilate in a vortex of apathy, nonsense and claustrophobia. I sink. I’m in a non-place and in a non-time.
What I feel and what I think merges with what I see. My gaze turns somberly toward objects, spaces and reflections. Inside me, the emptiness takes shape.

Author
Melissa Ianniello  (Naples, 1991) is a documentary photographer based in Bologna, Italy. After graduating in Philosophy, she studied documentary photography at “Photo Workshop New York”, in Brooklyn.
In 2018 she began her first long-term project, Wish it Was a Coming Out, about the taboo in Italy surrounding elderly homosexual people. In 2020, she was selected as a student for the XXXIII Eddie Adams Workshop. Above all, in that year, she was hospitalized because of health problems: from this experience, she created the project That Month. In 2022, her first solo exhibition takes place in the United States, at the Rochester Art Center in Rochester (Minneapolis).
She has won several Italian and international awards, and meanwhile her photographs have been exhibited at important festivals. Most importantly, she was a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Grant 2020.
Her artistic research focuses on themes related to sexuality and identity, drawing from intimate and autobiographical experiences.

Website
www.melissaianniello.com

Instagram
@melissa_ianniello

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