Toulouse. “La Déconniatrie”: what is this new exhibition at the Abattoirs? We tell you everything
Through Gabriel Kenedi
Published on
(© Roberto Ruiz)
From October 14 until March 6, 2022, a new exhibition entitled “La Déconniatrie” is to see at the Abattoirs museum, a Toulouse. Here’s what you’ll find there.
Art, exile and psychiatry
This exhibition unveils a little-known story that made a date in psychiatry in the 20th century.e century. It has enabled the collective transformation of psychiatric institutions.
It has also influenced the course of the history of modern art by promoting the appearance of art brut. ” The Deconniatry “ costume life and the work of the incredible doctor François Tosquelles (1912-1994) who fled like 500,000 Spanish refugees the Francoist victory
after three years of war in Spain (1936-1939).
Who was François Tosquelles?
After several months of detention in the Septfonds camp, the psychiatrist moved during the Occupation to Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in Lozère.
In Saint-Alban, he contributes to making the local psychiatric hospital the cradle of a new current of French psychiatry, baptized “Institutional psychotherapy”. Before treating the internees, the institution must be treated, ill because it is too repressive: through the training of guards, the establishment of occupational therapy workshops and the empowerment of patients, a new asylum is emerging. . In the hospital where he works, he then makes emerge new care practices located on the humanization, the collective, the work and the artistic activity by the patients.
A “disalienating” psychiatry
During the Second World War and the years that followed, the hospital where Tosquelles touched, as well as the surrealist psychiatrist from Toulouse Lucien Bonnafe, receives artists and writers on the run, in exile or in transit ; we find there for example Nusch and Paul Eluard, then Tristan Tzara, who are struck by the place and its inhabitants. In the post-war period is taking place the foundations of a “disalienating” psychiatry, known as of
sector which treats the institution as well as the sick, supported by common activities such as cinema, clubs and newspapers including the famous internal newspaper Trait d’union.
Avant-garde psychiatrists work there. The role of women in this experience
unprecedented and collective, whether patient or caregiver, is also proving to be major.
“What presents psychoanalysis is that it has to be invented. The individual remembers nothing. We allow him to mess around. We say to him: ‘Kidding, kidding! It’s called associating. No one is judging you here, you can mess around at your ease. ‘ I, psychiatry, call it deconniatry. But, while the patient is kidding, what am I doing? In silence or by intervening – but above all in silence – I am kidding myself “
What to see?
![Unknown artist, Portrait of François Tosquelles painted by a prisoner from Septfonds, circa 1939, watercolor, 15 x 10 cm. Ou-Rabah Family Collection - Tosquelles;](https://static.actu.fr/uploads/2021/10/05-1.jpg)
From the career of François Tosquelles, common thread of the exhibition, are questioned the relationship between art, exile and psychiatry, and the notion of creation in the context of
exclusion, confinement or hospitalization, writ of alienation.
Starting from a remote rural location, it is a question here of crossing the history of psychiatry,
politics, decolonialism, modern art, surrealism and art brut or even
avant-garde cinema. This exhibition brings together many works, not
those created by residents in the hospital, as well as unpublished films, books,
archives, photographs and contemporary creations.
With this proposal, the Musée des Abattoirs is continuing its long-standing research on creation in exile (Picasso and exile. A history of Spanish art in resistance; I was born a foreigner), on postcolonialism, and the status of the work of art, in the continuity of the study and the hangings of the Daniel Cordier collection.
The cultural contribution of Spanish exiles and the history of regional and rural art,
to be at the origin of this new project. Through this exhibition, it is the place of the “other” perceived as undesirable, foreign, sick, unfit for life in society, which is once again at the heart of the Abattoirs. This story and the experimental practices of François Tosquelles celebrate this “Right to vagrancy” body and mind.
An international expo
This project covers four institutions in three countries and will circulate in 2022 at the Center de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and in 2023 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
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