Invisible

We see people every day. We see their faces, their gestures, the way they move through the city. We share the streets, bars the office space, but, how much can we really see?

Invisible transforms Rotterdam’s Binnenrotte central space into a silent crowd of identical figures. Hundreds of white mannequins stand among us, representing the people we encounter every day. During the day, they are indistinguishable. At night, some begin to glow from within.
These figures represent people living with invisible illnesses, chronic pain or mental health conditions: realities that cannot be recognized simply by looking at someone.

According to the World Health Organization around 1 in 6 people worldwide lives with a disability, many of them invisible. Mental health disorders alone affect nearly one billion people globally, while millions more live with chronic conditions that remain unseen by those around them. Yet because these realities are invisible, they are often misunderstood, underestimated, or simply ignored.

The installation turns the city into a living dataset, displaying this invisible reality into a shared public experience. A familiar square becomes a place where visitors can see, perhaps for the first time, how much remains unseen around them.
By making the invisible visible, the installation seeks to normalize conversations around mental health and invisible or chronic illness, replacing stigma with familiarity and judgment with curiosity. Awareness does not emerge from information alone: it emerges from experience

Because what we see is never the whole story, because many carry something we cannot see, because not everything that hurts can be seen: choose empathy

Per Anna.

Credits:

• Design: Cosimo Scotucci

• Year: 2026