ReMIND focuses on the potentials for ‘mind museums’—former asylums turned into museums—to provoke emotional responses among visitors and foster critical reflection on the histories and contemporary problems of managing mental illness (MI) in society.

The project explores the MI heritage landscape through asylums built around Europe from the mid-19th century until the 1960s deinstitutionalisation process in the psychiatric care system. Today, most of these buildings still stand where they were, as unsettling traces and reminders of a grim human, social, medical and architectural story: they are often completely or partially abandoned, left to decay and contributing to urban decline. Their redevelopment is an important challenge that cannot be further postponed.
ReMIND involves three main assumptions. Firstly, that former asylums and psychiatric hospitals constitute a neglected European heritage—one that is disregarded and in danger and that holds an overlooked potential for disclosing a Europe-wide history, as well as opening a dialogue about urgent current social and cultural issues. Secondly, that the conservation and valorisation of this heritage hinges on its reuse and reactivation, and that this must be planned and undertaken in a sustainable and relevant way from an architectural as well as social and cultural points of view, respecting the often-minor, hidden stories embedded and witnessed by these spaces. Thirdly, that the importance of this built heritage lies not so much in its architectural and historical value, however remarkable, but in the potential of these buildings to act as powerful places for fostering conscious and productive discourses on civility and care. My argument is that upon conversion into public cultural spaces, such as museums, the evocative nature of such buildings can provoke strong emotional and empathic reactions in visitors, which in turn can have the effect of supporting and contributing to reflection that, using Fredi Drugman's words: ‘cannot exist [...] if reason is not associated with an emotion’.
ReMIND will survey the broader European landscape of MI heritage, considering, for example, phenomena such as abandonment, or the adaptive reuse of historic asylums for housing. However, alongside this general desk-based overview, the main focus of fieldwork is to analyse former asylums that have been recently restored and adaptively reused as mind museums, specifically involving in-depth interdisciplinary pilot case studies on selected case studies. With ‘mind museum’ I mean not merely historical museums of psychiatry, but cultural sites devoted to the representation of the history of MI care and treatment that also have the mission to promote awareness about MI today.
The aim of this is to promote responsible and caring approaches to the heritage of MI, as well as to conjoin complimentary disciplinary approaches and develop new research competence for me as Fellow and for the host institution. The overarching objective is to explore the actual and potential relationship and mutual intertwinement between contemporary architecture, adaptive reuse, exhibition design practices and emerging theories and methodologies related to museum and critical heritage studies. To achieve these objectives and comprehensively grasp the complexity of the issues at stake, I will work at the intersection of different research fields and my study will integrate various disciplinary approaches to rethink adaptive reuse interventions and contemporary heritage conservation and valorisation practices.
At present, we do not have a co-ordinated strategy or sense of potentials for the responsible adaptive re-use of asylums as museums, and they are in danger. Likewise, we do not understand their potential for effecting attitudinal change in visitors that may help to dismantle stigma and promote collective senses of care. This project addresses these gaps.

The ReMIND project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 841174. It will run for two years from July 2019 to June 2021 under the scientific resposability of Dr. Francesca Lanz with the supervision of Prof. Chris Whitehead at the Newcastle University, School of Arts and Cultures – Media Culture Heritage Department.