This lecture explores moving-image archives related to a psychiatric reform and resistance movement which aimed to radically “desalinate” patients by restituting their social, mental, and environmental milieus. “Healing the institution” before any individual cure was the crucial principle of institutional psychotherapy, a practice initiated by François Tosquelles, Georges Daumezon, Gisela Pankow, and Frantz Fanon, and further developed by Félix Guattari, Ginette Michaud, Anne Querrien, Jean Oury, and others. Initiated during the occupation of France in the early 1940s, when over 40.000 patients became victims of the national socialist extermination policy under the Vichy regime (“extermination douce”), this practice of resistance gave rise to a number of anti-colonial, desegregationist, queer/feminist, environmental, and anti-racist movements.

Developed in the frame of institutional psychotherapy, geo-psychiatry proposed an entirely new environmental approach to mental health. Its “migrant workers” conceived the hospital no longer as an island, but as a social and mental bridge between worlds, as support for the patients to re-establish their connections. Media, such as film, photography, printing, and cartography, served to collectively re-invent and re-imagine the geography of the present: to produce environments, institutions, and milieus that would facilitate psychological therapy and healing. Drawing on newly discovered archives, the talk explores the fundamental role of art and media, which contributed to the emergence of psychiatric milieus. It also discusses the productive repercussions of these media-milieu practices in critical humanities discourses.

“Geo-psychiatry: Media, Milieus and the Politics of Madness” is part of the ongoing lecture series Film Beyond Film: Art and the Moving Image at e-flux Screening Room by researchers whose work has formed the discourse at the intersection of modern/contemporary art and cinema, and that focus on the histories of artists’ films, situating them within broader aesthetic, political, and economic contexts.

Elena Vogman is a scholar of comparative literature and media. She is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe” at Bauhaus University Weimar and Visiting Fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Her current work focuses on the politics of madness and its intersections with decolonial discourse, psychoanalysis, feminism, and institutional psychotherapy. She has published two books, Sinnliches Denken. Eisensteins exzentrische Methode (Sensuous Thinking. Eisenstein’s Eccentric Method, 2018) and Dance of Values: Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project (2019), and was Visiting Professor at École normale supérieure, Paris and New York University Shanghai. Together with Marie Rebecchi and Till Gathmann, she co-curated Sergei Eisenstein and the Anthropology of Rhythm (2017) and Eccentric Values After Eisenstein (2018).

For more information, contact [email protected].

Accessibility

• Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
• For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator that leads into the e-flux office space. The entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
• e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.

Time: 7:00 PM EST

Free!

Registration