Lecture by Joana Masó

From the 1930s onwards, psychiatrist François Tosquelles took part in the great project to transform psychiatric institutions, through forms of sociotherapy and occupational therapy that made room for cooperatives and work within the hospital. Artistic practices were intertwined with other collective practices, such as cinema, theatre, singing and writing, which did not give a specific place to art or to what would later be called art therapy workshops. Yet these works arrived in our art history and in our museums not as works that carried with them a project of emancipation from asylums and madness, but as works by isolated patients, separated from culture, under the label of art brut. It is this great historical and political misunderstanding that we need to put right today.

Presentation by Florian Fouché

In 1994, Irina Nicolau wrote (in French) “Le musée antidote” (The Antidote Museum), a manifesto inspired by the experience of the Romanian Peasant Museum: “You don’t go to the M.A. as you would to a church, a school, a court, a hospital or a cemetery, but as you would to a museum”. Florian Fouché will be putting into perspective the “Time Room” initiated by Irina Nicolau, a “political installation” in which the objects are in a state of “assisted death”.