THE CONCEPT OF BLOOM

In response to seeing, exploring, and photographing the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, I developed Bloom as a site-specific installation to commemorate the life and history of the building and its people, as well as to mark the transition of MMHC into a new place and architecture. Bloom is an idea for creating a tribute to the historic building of Mass Mental -- that is, an entity of a creative work, guided by the fact that Mass Mental itself is a whole with connected limbs, busy centers, quiet ends, wings, nooks and crannies, and nonetheless a living, moving whole.

In November of 2003, all spaces at the Mass Mental Health Center will be raised out of the uniform fabric of the building into individual fields of color: thousands of flowers will be placed in the old hallways, rooms, and staircases to mark the many memories connected to this site. Each hallway will have a different type of flower. Each will be a different stretch of color. The axes of the building, its layout and scope, will be recognized individually.

All of the flowers will be in bloom at the same time, creating a continuous, unbroken composition of color and scent throughout the building:

...so that for four days
in November of 2003
the Massachusetts Mental Health Center

will be

in bloom.

On an earlier date, before everyone has moved out, a recording of the ambient soundscape of the building will be made, to be played during the flower installation by using the old announcement (PA) system of Mass Mental. Steps in the corridors, doors closing and opening, and passing fragments of distant conversations will be heard at a low volume, bridging the life and motion of the place with its impending abandonment.

The thoughts that led me to the idea for Bloom included a consideration of the two courtyards of MMHC and their thick blankets of ivy (the notion of growth): the reversal - inside/out - of nature into the urban setting of MMHC, when all other psychiatric institutions in Massachusetts are situated in more rural settings with abundant nature at their feet. Another aspect of the architecture of Mass Mental that I find fascinating are the color-less, seemingly endless hallways that run through the building like arteries, guiding our bodies through the space. These hallways are an inspiration for bringing color to their function and their directions of traffic, where no such color has been before.

Bloom is also a reflection on the healing symbolism of flowers being given to the sick when they are bedridden and confined to hospital settings, with the astounding, persistent exception of long-term psychiatric patients, who receive few, if any flowers during their hospital stay. Walking through the hallways of an institution, still to this day, one cannot find any flowers in the rooms. Bloom is created in the spirit of offering and transition.

As a public project created within the urban center of Boston, Bloom will encompass thousands of square feet of historic indoor space that is being left to abandonment. Bloom will only exist for four days. Afterwards the flowers will be donated to surrounding hospitals and state institutions.

Anna Schuleit

Anna Schuleit is a visual artist whose work revolves around the social and architectural history of state hospitals. She is the organizer of Habeas Corpus, the November 2000 memorial for the Northampton State Hospital, which included a sound installation in its abandoned historic building, as well as a symposium, a forum, and three exhibitions in Northampton, MA. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, is currently a graduate student at Dartmouth and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Banff Centre, and Blue Mountain Center. She is a member of the Revolving Museum for Public Art and volunteers as visiting artist at Westborough State Hospital, MA, where she initiated a creative book project to preserve the untold stories, drawings, and paintings by long-term residents. www.anna-schuleit.com