Judith Bellavance
in Percé

While doing a residency with Diaphane, pôle photographique en Hauts-de-France, I became interested in the “little suitcase attic.” The emblem of a bygone time, the place is located in a disused pavilion of the Centre Hospitalier Isarien, which specializes in psychiatric care. It contains the vestiges of numerous lives shattered by mental illness. Hundreds of cloth-wrapped little packages of personal belongings are stored in this attic. The practice involved packing up the effects of psychiatric patients when they entered an institution, and putting them in safekeeping for the long term. Many of the patients never got out again, so their little packages piled up from 1880 all the way to the late 1980s. Moved by just how many remnants of lives were preserved and stacked in the little suitcase attic, I wanted to remove these shut-away lives from anonymity.

So I set off to discover the premises and to meet the people who worked there, in order to provide a context for the existence of the little packages and to give a voice to all those lost patients. In the later years of this practice, it was still not unusual for psychiatric patients to spend the rest of their lives in an institution. The care and service that was provided structured the existence of those people, on the fringes of family life and the social fabric. It was in the late 1970s that a gradual dismantling of this autarkic system got under way, with a move to reintegrate patients in society. By the time this deinstitutionalization process ended, stays that varied in length no longer required the use of the little packages, nor their storage.

The little suitcase attic, with all its content, would fall into disuse like a cemetery of forgotten lives. The rubble of liver, these little packages are the last witnesses to the habits and customs of a bygone era. I used my observational approach to tell a story from memory, inspired by these interrupted lives, buried under the dust of silence and oblivion.