Who is Marco Cavallo?

From the asylum system to contemporary resistance

by Camilla Ponti

The Origins of the Marco Cavallo Sculpture

The sculpture of Marco Cavallo, a four-metre-tall horse made of wood and papier-mâché, distinguished by its vivid blue colour, was created in 1973 within the San Giovanni psychiatric hospital in Trieste. It was developed by a group of artists - including Vittorio Basaglia, cousin reformer Franco Basaglia - in collaboration with patients of the institution. The project emerged from a collective struggle led by institutionalised patients to save the life of a real horse, Marco. After years spent transporting laundry and waste within the asylum, the animal was destined for slaughter.

Within a context tending toward the dehumanization of the people it “hosted” and the silencing of their voices and demands, this collective struggle by patients for the life, dignity, and freedom of their animal companion was a true revolution.

It even reached the Province of Trieste, which granted them permission to keep the horse and care for him.

Marco Cavallo and the Closure of Psychiatric Institutions

After this great victory—which represented a crucial precedent in breaking the total isolation of asylums from the outside world—not only did the desire grow stronger, but so did the urgency to continue opening the path toward the liberation of people confined in psychiatric hospitals and the closure of these inhumane places.

From this came the idea for the Marco Cavallo sculpture. Although patients did not directly participate in the physical creation of the artwork, they shaped its concept, content, appearance, and color. The bright blue was chosen as a symbol of the desire to live, in stark contrast to the deadly, suffocating, and torturous environment surrounding them. Its imposing size and height conveyed a clear message: Marco Cavallo did not simply look through, but beyond an idea of care based on containment, confinement, and the erasure of individuals.

For this reason, when the path toward the abolition of asylums reached its most significant moment with the Basaglia Law of 1978 —which formally decreed their closure—Marco Cavallo became the emblem of this achievement, both legislative and human.

But the story of Marco Cavallo did not end with with the dismantling of the asylum system

Marco Cavallo and the Horse of Jenin

After the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals, his figure continued to live on as a symbol of resistance, emancipation, and self-organization in struggles against violent, oppressive, and torturous state practices. A symbol capable of crossing borders, reaching occupied Palestine, in the Jenin refugee camp, where it encountered Al-Hissan, the Horse of Jenin. Inspired by its Trieste counterpart, Al-Hissan was created in 2003—following a massacre of Palestinian civilians in April 2002 in the Jenin refugee camp by Zionist military forces—through collaboration between German artist Thomas Kilpper and the children of Jenin. The sculpture was built using scraps from ambulances and materials resulting from Israeli destruction. Palestinian psychiatrist and psychotherapist Samah Jabr, in an article titled “Sculpting Liberation: The Stories of Marco Cavallo and the Horse of Jenin” reflects on how these horses, distant yet inseparably connected, express a universal need for creative and symbolic expression as a form of resistance to atrocities. The struggles represented by these two sculptures—deinstitutionalization and the humanization of mental suffering in Trieste, and decolonization and liberation in Jenin—also testify to the healing and therapeutic power of collective art, in opposition to vertical, state, and neo-colonial violence.

Even within regimes of apartheid or violent total institutions, the emergence of such a strong need for artistic expression reveals something deeply human: the necessity of remaining in relation with oneself and others through shared symbols and collective memory. These two statues show how mental health, both individual and collective, is inseparably linked to our ability to imagine, dream, and create together, giving space to imagination as a form of resistance. In January 2023, the Horse of Jenin was destroyed by the same Israeli colonial violence from which it had emerged.

The origins of administrative detention in Italy

Following the Palestine–Italy axis traced by the thread connecting these two sculptures and the struggles they embody, the need—and urgency—to continue Marco Cavallo’s struggle in Italy becomes clear. While the Basaglian abolitionist legacy entered the legal system—more than the socio-cultural fabric—in 1998 the Turco-Napolitano law introduced a new total institution based on selective and racialized logic: the Centres for Permanence for Repatriation (CPR), then called Temporary Detention Centres. Today, this reality increasingly shows a drift toward an asylum-like model. The type of detention applied in these “non-places” is administrative and is enforced following a mere administrative offense: lacking proper documentation. The neo-colonial and hierarchical nature of these practices also emerges from their historical framing.

One significant precedent is the use of administrative detention by Israel since 1967 in the occupied Palestinian territories: a tool allowing the imprisonment of Palestinians without trial or charges, based on administrative decisions.

This model, founded on the suspension of legal guarantees for specific populations, has contributed to normalizing forms of detention that we now find—albeit with differences but similar logic—in European migration systems. According to Defense for Children Palestine, in December 2025, 180 children were held in administrative detention.

Administrative Detention as Necropolitics

Administrative detention is one of the clearest expressions of contemporary necropolitics: a set of internal and external neo-colonial policies that expose certain categories of people to death—direct, symbolic, or social—in order to preserve the life and privilege of others.

In Italy, its explicit purpose is to combat irregular migration through detention and deportation. However, actual deportation data tells a different story. According to ActionAid’s report “Detained: An X-ray of the detention system for foreigners,” in 2023 only about 10% of people with expulsion orders were actually deported. At the same time, the law allows the expulsion of people who have lived in Italy for decades but failed to renew their residence permits.

These elements show that the real function of CPRs is not so much deportation as it is control and discipline over racialized bodies and lives, leading to the denial of fundamental rights, starting with the right to life.

Abuse and dehumanizing practices within CPRs are not incidental but structural, forming the basis of a system designed to annihilate those it detains. Violence is not a consequence but the very essence of administrative detention—just as death is one of its daily components.

Moussa Balde, Simo Said, Wissem Ben Abdel Latif, Ousmane Sylla, Vakhtang Enukidze, Mohammed Ben Said are just some of the names of people who have died, directly or indirectly, in CPRs.

The psychopathogenic effects of CPRs

Activists and professionals have increasingly documented the intrinsically harmful effects of administrative detention on both physical and mental health. Since 2018, the network Mai più Lager – No ai CPR has exposed the severe conditions within these facilities, highlighting their evolution towards forms of institutional violence comparable to those of asylums.

The absence of adequate care, the use of isolation, and the routine deployment of coercion create environments characterised by the systematic denial of fundamental rights. Practices such as pharmacological restraint, the psychiatric framing of dissent, and the medicalisation of suffering further reinforce these dynamics. Taken together, these elements position CPRs as spaces of racialised segregation that combine features of detention centres, prisons, and psychiatric institutions.

According to Sunjay Gookooluk, poet, artist, activist, and a former detainee in CPRs, - then known as CIEs, Identification and Expulsion Centres -: “A CPR is a place that depresses, that induces stress, that makes even a healthy person ill. You are detained there as if you were some kind of dangerous threat, when in reality your only ‘offence’ is being present in a territory without a valid visa, document, or passport. It is a place that strips you of every basic human right.

Simply being a foreigner is treated as something to be identified and confined: you are a foreigner, often having arrived alone in Europe in search of a normal life, only to find yourself marginalised, living on the streets.

Those who endure this situation often go through years of marginalisation before being regularised, while others, in order to survive, end up in petty crime, then in prison, losing any hope of obtaining legal status. It is a self-perpetuating cycle. It is an absurd world in which the ‘healthy’ become truly unwell, while those labelled as ‘ill’—the detainees—are in fact the ones who retain their humanity, whereas the outside world, which is violent and sick, appears to function normally. There are those who leave behind war, poverty, and hunger, crossing the Mediterranean—a graveyard of bodies—and risking their lives just to reach Europe. Yet it is precisely here, in Europe, that their dreams are ultimately shattered. When you find yourself locked inside a CPR, you have no rights and are treated like waste, confined in a cage for months.”

Marco Cavallo’s journey for the closure of all CPRs

After the first journey of Marco Cavallo outside the Judicial Psychiatric Hospitals, organised in 2013—facilities later closed in 2015 but quickly replaced by the Residences for the Execution of Security Measures—in 2025 the Forum Salute Mentale, together with numerous associations, collectives, and anti-racist and anti-psychiatric networks, promoted a new initiative, this time in front of some Italian CPRs. The objective was to denounce the structural violence of administrative detention, to expand and root within communities the abolitionist struggle for the closure of all CPRs, and to break the invisibilisation that surrounds the people confined in these total institutions.

Whether they are called CPRs or asylums, whether neo-colonial state violence occurs in Italy or Palestine, Marco Cavallo and the Horse of Jenin remind us that the meaning of a symbol— even when physically destroyed—remains alive as long as what it represents continues to be preserved and transmitted in collective memory.

Works such as those of Marco Cavallo and the Horse Al-Hissan are not only artistic productions, but forms of collective care and grassroots resistance.

The struggles for decolonisation and liberation of the two Horses will continue until the whole world is free from the various forms taken by colonial, racist, imperialist, and supremacist violence. Until freedom of movement and the self-determination of all peoples become the guiding principles of our communities.