‘La Déconniatrie’ follows the life and work of Dr François Tosquelles (1912-1994), who, like 500,000 Spanish refugees, fled Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). After several months in the Septfonds camp, the psychiatrist moved to Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in Lozère during the Occupation. In the hospital where he worked, with the idea of caring for the patients as well as the institution, he developed new care practices based on humanisation, collective work and artistic activity by the residents, whose creations circulated locally before being collected by Jean Dubuffet under the name of art brut.
During the Second World War and in the years that followed, the hospital, where Tosquelles and the surrealist psychiatrist Lucien Bonnafé from Toulouse practised, received artists and writers on the run, in exile or just passing through; Nusch and Paul Eluard, for example, and later Tristan Tzara, who were struck by the place and its inhabitants. In the post-war period, the foundations were laid for a ‘disalienating’ psychiatry, known as a sector, supported by shared activities such as cinema,.clubs and newspapers, including the famous in-house journal Trait d’union. Avant-garde psychiatrists trained and worked there, such as Frantz Fanon, a writer and thinker from Martinique whose ideas influenced post-colonialism. Women also played a major role in this unprecedented collective experience, whether as patients or carers.
Through this exhibition, the place of the ‘other’, perceived as undesirable, foreign, ill, unfit for life in society, is once again at the heart of Les Abattoirs. Based on the work of François Tosquelles, the exhibition examines the relationship between art, exile and psychiatry, and the notion of creation in the context of exclusion, confinement or hospitalisation – in short, alienation. Taking as its starting point a remote rural location, the project will bring together the history of psychiatry, politics, post-colonialism, modern art, surrealism, art brut and avant-garde cinema. Bringing together a wide range of works, including those created by residents in the hospital, as well as previously unseen films, books, archives, photographs and contemporary creations, this project celebrates the ‘right to wander’ of body and mind, in the words of François Tosquelles.
