A Tree Called Homeis a critical examination of a system built to house and take care of citizens judged to be “undesirable” in Russia. Persons with physical and mental disabilities are stigmatized, hidden from the public, and rendered largely invisible in a network of state-run institutions.
Since 2002, Kent Klich has documented the workings of one such institution that houses more than 1,000 people. He also collaborated with Aleksey Sakhnov, an artist and long-term resident whose drawings and photographs, as well as images of his papier-mâché houses, are included here. Leonid Tsoy, a psychologist who worked in the same network of institutions, contributes his study on “The Psychoneurological Asylums in Russia,” focusing on the relationships between normativity and violence.
