/ House of wandering spirits

House Cornax, located in the city center of The Hague, housed around 35 men with a history of psychiatric issues. The rundown guesthouse was run by a local family that didn’t meet any official requirements, but the municipality valued it for providing shelter to those with nowhere else to go. The government promoted a policy of socialization, aiming to integrate psychiatric patients into society rather than keeping them in institutions—driven partly by ideology and partly by budget constraints. However, not all patients were able to adapt to this system.

For my graduate project at KABK, I documented this community of men in a portrait series, which was later published in M Magazine and NRC Handelsblad in 2001