“That Month” is a subjective journey 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. Bars on the windows. Everything so aseptic. Am I still capable of feeling emotions? A pill to stabilize me, a shot 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.
Melissa Ianniello (Naples, 1991) is an Italian documentary photographer. In 2018 she began her first long-term project, Wish it Was a Coming Out. In 2020 she was selected for the XXXIII Eddie Adams Workshop. In 2022 her first solo exhibition takes place in the USA, at the Rochester Art Center (Minneapolis). She has won several international awards, her photographs have been exhibited at important festivals and 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.
