[spectre] CONF: Queer Tosquelles 2024 (Koeln, 21-22 Jun 24)

[Andreas Broeckmann LEU]

From: Anna Bromley
Date: Jun 17, 2024
Subject: CONF: Queer Tosquelles 2024 (Koeln, 21-22 Jun 24)

Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Aula, Filzengraben 2, 50676 Köln, Jun 
21–22, 2024

QUEER TOSQUELLES will engage with the history of revolutionary, 
anti-fascist psychiatric practices and their involvement in ways of 
fleeing and resisting since the 1920s in Spain, France, Italy, and Germany.

The international conference will focus on the practices of 
Catalan/French psychiatrist François Tosquelles (1912–1994), who 
influenced Félix Guattari, Frantz Fanon and many others – from 
institutional analysis to political philosophy.
Tosquelles is still largely unknown in Germany. For some years now, 
however, a lively reception has been taking place in the art field, 
especially in Spain and France, with large archival and research 
exhibitions, catalogues and films.

The conference at the KHM will bring together researchers and artists 
working on the genealogies of Tosquelles's manifold surrounds and 
exploring the potentials of his practice today. Here, queerness emerges 
in many facets: through Tosquelles's insistence on the deconstruction of 
the nuclear family and the importance of other forms of making kin, 
through the various rhythms of vagabonding, through the weird, the 
strange, the non-sensical and the non-normalized, through a political 
philosophy of multiplicity, through a queering practice that traverses 
all non-identitarian forms of life.

With Janna Graham, Carles Guerra, Isabell Lorey, Angela Melitopoulos, 
Stefan Nowotny, Anne Querrien, Gerald Raunig, Wanderley Santos, 
Francesco Salvini, Henning Schmidgen, Elena Vogman.

Organized by Isabell Lorey, Anna Bromley, Konstantin Butz, Lilian 
Haberer, Katrin M. Kämpf, Mary Mikaelyan, Maren Mildner, Stefan Nowotny, 
Heidi Pfohl

In cooperation with the European Institute for Progressive Cultural 
Policies (eipcp)

Free entrance. In English - no online attendance or livestream available.

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Program

Friday – June 21

10:30 START
Welcoming by Mathias Antlfinger (Rector of the KHM), Lilian Haberer 
(Department Speaker of Art and Media Studies / KHM), Katrin M. Kämpf 
(Queer Studies / KHM),

Isabell Lorey
Ergotherapy, Vagabondage, and Instituent Care          In his 
revolutionary psychiatric practice, Francesc Tosquelles insists that 
institutions cannot care unless everyone cares for the institution. In 
the process of instituting, instituent care erodes the walls of the 
institution, spreads to the surroundings and allows itself to be 
transversally permeated. As a form of vagabondage, it remains unfamiliar 
and strange and allies itself with resistance. One of the many 
inspirations for these practices came from the reformatory psychiatric 
ergotherapy of Hermann Simon, director of the psychiatric hospital in 
Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, who increasingly advocated 
biologistic and social Darwinist positions at the end of the 1920s. 
Tosquelles hijacked Simon’s reformist practices to make revolutionary 
use of them.

Angela Melitopoulos
Déconnage (Lecture and Screening)
In its original form, Déconnage is a multi-screen video installation 
with an archive table and a selection of books (2012, 100 min, Color). 
Déconnage is part of Melitopoulos’s audiovisual research, in 
collaboration with Maurizio Lazzarato, about Félix Guattari and the 
concept of machinic animism. This installation and video about the 
Catalan, anarcho-syndicalist psychiatrist and resistance fighter 
Francesc Tosquelles was conceived as an interlinked archival survey in 
experimental audiovisual form. It narrates the beginnings of the 
institutional psychotherapy invented in the psychiatric asylum of 
Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in the Lozère department in southern France 
during the Second World War.

14:00 – 15:00 BREAK

Carles Guerra
Tosquelles and the Delusional Narrator
Francesc Tosquelles is a truly fascinating storyteller. Through the many 
interviews he gave during his lifetime, he emerges as a pragmatic 
character. Sometimes facing catastrophe or otherwise diffuse 
humanitarian crises. So much so that, by the end of his life, the 
several interviewers he attracted were amazed by his epic, yet farcical 
tone. His account of his own life often challenges factual and archival 
evidence. At stake here is his own right to be a delusional narrator.

Stefan Nowotny                    Living through the End of the World 
(as We Know It)
The question of catastrophic experience – an experience of ‘the end of 
the world’ – constitutes the subject of Tosquelles’s medical thesis Le 
vécu de la fin du monde dans la folie, submitted and defended in 1948. 
In the preface to its delayed publication in 1986, Tosquelles leaves no 
doubt that, while the thesis presented itself as a clinical account of 
such experiences ‘in madness’, he had written it under the impression of 
a madness inseparable from the dictates of normality: the madness of the 
Spanish Civil War and of World War II, which had indeed ended the worlds 
and lives of so many. Against this backdrop, I would firstly like to 
examine the intertwinement of clinical, philosophical and sociopolitical 
analyses in Tosquelles’s thesis and its implications for what would come 
to be termed institutional psychotherapy or institutional analysis. 
Secondly, I would like to consider the existential motif of an 
experienced ‘end of the world’ with a view to the desiring surges 
traversing it, but also to a radical multiplicity of experiences that 
challenges assumptions about the ‘we’ underpinning what is commonly 
perceived as a world.
            17:00 – 17:30 BREAK

Anne Querrien
Tosquelles: la folie citoyenne / Foolishness and Citizenship
Foolishness creates queer subjectivities, following as many paths as 
there are foolish persons. Foolishness, as a continuous variation on a 
given path, is blocked by repression or by the inability of the body to 
follow the mind.
Institutional psychotherapy creates spaces in which fools can express 
themselves by theater and can be political subjects, ordinary persons. 
Can the democratic spaces of the clinics be extended to other parts of 
society, as Guattari tried? Is this extension a kind of 
intersectionality, as in the local dispute between Tosquelles and Fanon?

18:30 END OF FIRST DAY

Saturday – June 22
10:30 START

Henning Schmidgen  Tosquelles and Canguilhem: A Pathbreaking Encounter
In the summer of 1944, philosopher Georges Canguilhem spent several 
weeks hiding and caring for wounded patients in the psychiatric clinic 
of Saint-Alban as a ‘resistance-physician’. During this time, Canguilhem 
took part in the clinical work carried out at Saint-Alban, among other 
things by examining and observing the patient ‘Mme. C…’. In return, as 
it were, Tosquelles, Bonnafé and others read and discussed the medical 
thesis that Canguilhem had defended at the Université de Strasbourg in 
1943, the famous Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the 
Pathological. My paper explores the convergences between the 
psychological views of Canguilhem and Tosquelles. It focuses on 
questions concerning the status of mental illness (and queerness) and 
the ‘normativity’, i.e., the autonomy, of organic individuals.

Elena Vogman                     Three Billion Perverts: Tosquelles and 
the Politics of the Body
In his research on ‘extensive psychiatry’ and myokinesis with Mira i 
Lopez in Catalonia, and then on his flight from the Franco regime to 
France via the concentration camp Septfonds, Tosquelles conceived of the 
human body as perpetually moving— ‘always a migrant’. Displacement, 
foreignness, madness became for him essential features of being human. 
They constituted the point of departure not only for the 
geo-psychiatric, aesthetic, and environmental approach to psychiatric 
care at Saint-Alban, but also for ‘the politics of the body’ advanced 
within the framework of ‘institutional analysis’ at La Borde clinic. 
This presentation focuses on the censored issue of the journal 
Recherches, founded by CERFI and directed by Félix Guattari, with the 
title ‘Three Billion Perverts. The Big Encyclopedia of Homosexualities’ 
(1973). Following Foucault, the talk analyses in the anonymous and 
collective contributions to this issue the political and aesthetic means 
of regaining ‘possession of [one’s] own body, and of the bodies of 
others […] for purposes other than [their] use as a workforce’.

12:30 – 13:00 BREAK

Janna Graham and Wanderley Santos 
      ‘Death’ in the gaps: Pedagogies of Individualisation and 
Dis-alienation in London Urban Secondary schools
This presentation will draw from contemporary scenes in urban secondary 
schools in London where racialised students – whether directed towards 
Ivy League universities or barista training programmes – are routinely 
moulded into individuals via strategies as divergent as attachment 
therapy, behavioural psychology and corporate workplace cosplay. Where 
Tosquelles’s analysis of concentrationist tendencies drew from the 
spaces of the clinic and the camp, in this presentation we will look at 
the production of the individual through colonial and neoliberal 
practices of subjectivation in schools, which, though sometimes adopting 
the forms used by Tosquelles and others (the team, the newspaper, the 
Club), do so within an apparatus of social death that renders the life 
and practice of groups impossible. Working at the meeting places between 
Fanon and Tosquelles we will test possibilities for how, within these 
contexts, we might produce ‘transferential constellations’, processes 
that – beyond the ideal of pure horizontality – generate 
micro-revolutions of the individual, multiple expressions of singularity 
and transversal relations in a collective space.

14:15 – 15:30 BREAK

Francesco Salvini                  Maquis in the Institutions
In 1987, a group of workers from Trieste met Francesc Tosquelles, a by 
now famous gathering recorded by Maurizio Costantino and Giovanna Gallio 
in La scuola di libertà (The School of Freedom). What emerges, as in 
other conversations of Tosquelles, is a style of research and invention 
that advances by association and displacement, in what Francesc 
Tosquelles calls déconnage. The point of arrival of the conversation is 
the common bet on a ‘maquis’ practice in the institutions. Starting from 
the word maquis, its polyvalence, its associations, its displacements we 
will propose a series of critical reflections on the complex and open 
relationship between Tosquelles’s practice and theory and the Basaglian 
experience in Trieste.

Gerald Raunig           Molecular Psycho-Breakdown-Services
In my lecture, I will focus less on the individual Francesc Tosquelles, 
but rather on the queer swarm, the dividual Tosquelles, in historical 
relations and fictional encounters. And if it proves aesthetically 
probable, this swarm will also meet Harry Spiegel and Irene Goldin, in 
breakdown services for the International Brigades, on flights over the 
Pyrenees or in disguises for the French Resistance. And their resistance 
will never have been individual, straightened and upright, but breaking 
up and building down, dissemblage, dividual, queer.

18:00 END


Reference / Quellennachweis:
CONF: Queer Tosquelles 2024 (Köln, 21-22 Jun 24). In: ArtHist.net, Jun 
17, 2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/42086>.