Event overview
Janna Graham and Anthony Faramelli, Goldsmiths Department of Visual Cultures
Visual Cultures Public Programme Spring 2020: "The Institution Overturned"
Taking our current moment of crises in both mental health and toxic institutional cultures as a starting point, this series explores the possibilities of Institutional Analysis through psychotherapy, radical forms of pedagogy, filmmaking, artistic and curatorial practices and the enduring work of theorist/practitioners including Franz Fanon and Felix Guattari, probing how institutional analysis might inform work being done today that seeks to radically open up institutional life.
Institutional Psychotherapy is one of the most significant, if under-studied, movements in the 20th Century. With members including Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, Francois Tosquelles and Anne Querrien, the practice, which evolved in post-war France, set out to radically transform the social and political conditions that prevented institutions from adequately caring for their patients, arguing that it was the society and institutions that make us ill. Whereas the better known Anti-Psychiatry movement endeavoured to destroy institutions, Institutional Psychotherapy saw the institution as a necessary space to alter social interactions and transformation.
The job, as such, was to radically reimagine institutional spaces so that were are able to facilitate egalitarian forms of sociality and from there, improve what we now describe as ‘mental health’. To this end, practitioners of Institutional Psychiatry developed a set of practices referred to as Institutional Analysis. Institutional Analysis provided the basis for Fanon’s system of decolonial psychiatry, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis and its methodological approach radiated out and informed important work in other fields such as sociology and urban studies and, in more recent years, contemporary art. It has also found significant home in intellectual, clinical and community spaces in South and Latin America.
In this ten part series, legacies of Institutional Analysis are read as offering possibilities beyond the neutralised gestures of institutional critique. In their direct address of micro political and micro-fascist dimensions of institutional articulation, they offer modes of social interrogation and change that undo and re-make the habitual fabric of institutions.
The Institution Overturned is developed in conjunction with the Network for Institutional Analysis, an international group working to research and activate the legacies of Institutional Analysis. Many of the sessions will also be recorded and aired on the newly formed web radio station, Radio Chimeres. It is a precursor to the Goldsmiths Short Course On Institutional Analysis offered summer 2020
"The Institution Overturned" is organised by Anthony Faramelli (Visual Cultures) and Janna Graham (Visual Cultures) with the Network for Institutional Analysis
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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16 Jan 2020 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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