Blog

We invite you to Cmurek Castle for an unforgettable late summer evening. In the shelter of the castle walls, in one of the most beautiful Renaissance courtyards in Slovenia, a tasting of excellent wines from selected winemakers of Štajerska region will take place. We will enrich the event with an interesting cultural program.

Simon Chang is a photographer who started photographing patients in psychiatric institutions in 2004 in Prague, where he photographed the Bohnice institution for several years. Between 2018 and 2019, he photographed the Hawler Psychiatric Hospital in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, whose cells are mainly filled with patients suffering from the effects of the recent war devastation. This time, the series of photographs is presented in Cmurek Castle, which operated as a State Asylum for the Mentally and Neurologically Ill between 1956 and 2004.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Museum of Madness, we hosted two events on June 24, 2023 at Cmurek Castle in Trate. The talks aimed at reflecting on the challenges and importance of preserving and revitalizing cultural heritage. Recordings of the talks can now be viewed on our YouTube channel.

You are kindly invited to attend the two-day art embroidery workshop at the Museum of Madness Trate on Monday and Tuesday, 18 and 19 September, under the guidance of Saša Bezjak, painter, pedagogue and all-round artist. The workshop is organised in the framework of the European project EMPACT. In EMPACT we’ve set out to tackle the themes of empathy and sustainability and the relationship between them under the slogan "The art of thinking like a mountain".

The first volume of the Museum of Madness is here, with academic and professional articles and reflections on what is still missing in the community so that we can talk about solidarity, about community life and so that people who live in institutions because they are disabled and disadvantaged can return from there, and so that others who are still living at home do not have to go there. The articles and reflections are a continuation and a follow-up of the discussions we started at the Alpe Adria Danube Network on Deinstitutionalisation conference in June 2021 at Cmurek Castle in Trate.

For the first time, the Museum of Madness is awarding a recognition for the best student theses. This award is to publicly commend young people whose work over the past academic year has explored the treatment of people with mental health problems and/or institutional care, drawing attention to the need to realise human rights and provide services in the community.

On this year's Day for the Mura, we will meet at 15:00 on the forest path by the Cmurek Bridge and take a guided walk into the "European Amazon".

It's been an incredible seven years since we experienced an extraordinary time of open borders in Styria. Some of us arrived in Radgona or Šentilj after a long flight, others were there with warm tea, soup and baby diapers to humanely support people on their way. Many life paths crossed then, many of us stayed connected.

On 10 September 2022, we will be opening a new permanent exhibition on the history of life and work in the former mental and nervous institution at Trate. The new exhibition gives a voice to the former workers, the people who survived the institution at Trate and their relatives who came to Trate to see their loved ones. It offers a glimpse into a world that is largely unknown to most of us, and calls on us to work together to develop services in the community, in the home, where people usually live, or at home.

In the ten years of the Museum of Madness, cultural-artistic interventions have proven to be an important complement to the historical record of the institutions' work. The abandoned rooms of the Cmurek Castle have become a space for remembering, testifying and discussing the social construction of madness and mental health.