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LA STAMPA

Meet The Italian Psychiatrist Who Treats Both Humans And Chimpanzees

A program in Uganda helps chimpanzees deal with their emotions through sign language and art. Mariangela Ferrero can compare their woes to those of her human patients near Turin.

"Tell me how that makes you feel..."
"Tell me how that makes you feel..."
Antonella Mariotti

TURIN - “They killed my mother. And they killed her to take me...”

Michael was around 10 years old, which is still young for a gorilla, when he realized that he could communicate with sign language. And naturally, he went straight to his therapist, in her white coat, and told her about the day his mother was kidnapped. “I still hear gunshots. At night I can still see them cutting off my mother’s head.”

Michael died a few years ago. But there are many other apes with traumatic and violent pasts that can be helped to recover emotionally and adapt to their new life of freedom at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda. Here, for part of the year, Italian Mariangela Ferrero works as a psychotherapist. For the rest of the year she works with human patients in Pinerolo, near Turin.

In the heart of Africa, she works with the primates and has put in place the Picture Making Emotional Enrichment (PME) program. “As with humans,” she says, “pictures help the primates to establish a rapport with others from their species, thus returning to a new life in freedom.”

Just like humans, all apes are able to draw, even if they’re not all “artists.” “Some however, understand that the material that we offer them is for drawing and they’re inquisitive. And, when they finish one, they give that specific picture a title,” she says.

This relationship between primates and pictures has already been noted, but what Ferrero brings forward is the use of drawing for emotional recovery; with humans, art therapy has been used for quite some time now. “PME has given us some very interesting results in regard to the improvement of mental well-being and painting production,” explains the psychotherapist.

Meet Medina, the shy artist

There are two reasons that convinced Ferrero to continue on with the project. “One has to do with enthusiasm, the other with hope. On my second day at Ngamba Island, a very gentle adult chimpanzee named Pasa, who, after having observed the first session of PME with one of the other monkeys, decided to lock herself in the enclosure, refusing to go back to the forest like usual in the evening. She completely refused all efforts to get her to leave. Then, when the staff decided to leave her, Pasa called me, letting me know she wanted to paint something.”

Another similar case was with Medina: “He’s a sweet and shy five-year-old chimpanzee who would withdraw into himself in group situations, had difficulty making his needs known or playing with the others. He was always worried and protected his food. However, he had a special talent for using complex techniques in pictorial experimentation.”

Medina uses crayons instead of tempera, and even folds up his artwork to make some of them three-Dimensional. “When he's finished,” says Ferrero, “he pauses to observe the result. He’s the best artist among all the participants at PME. Art allows him to overcome the trauma he experienced when he was young, and now he has a better relationship with the other chimpanzees.”

The PME project unfortunately now risks closing. “We need funds to go on. I work for free but we need materials and structures. The mental health of animals is just as important as the physical – just like for humans.”

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Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

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