News

We are delighted to announce the publication of our co-PI Elena Vogman’s new essay, “Séance: Technology of Disalienation” in e-flux Journal.

The article revisits a remarkable 1961 film screening at the Saint-Alban psychiatric clinic in France – organized at the request of François Tosquelles, one of the main initiators of institutional psychotherapy – where works by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin were shown to an audience of patients, caregivers, farmers, and local villagers. Vogman traces how “séances” such as this one as well as experimental cinematic practices linked to the history of institutional psychotherapy functioned as therapeutic forms of mediation, as technologies of disalienation offering the possibility of repairing shattered worlds and reconfiguring relations between self, others and environment.

On October 1–2, 2025, the international symposium Lygia Clark: Artistic Practice in Transcultural Contexts will take place at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin. Organized on the occasion of the first German retrospective of Lygia Clark at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the event will bring together international scholars and practitioners to discuss Clark’s radical artistic practice and its transcultural resonance across art history, theory, pedagogy, psychiatry, and contemporary art.

We are especially delighted to highlight the contribution of "Madness, Media, Milieus" Co-PI Marlon Miguel, who will give a talk entitled:
“Preuve du réel: Relational Situations between Art and Clinic”
° Thursday, October 2, 2025
° 10:00 AM

For more information and the full program, please visit the conference page.

The event "Operativism. Social Intelligence and Mediation" is organized by Marietta Kesting and Elena Vogman.

The notion of ‘operativism’ had a notable career in the twentieth century, articulating the relation between Marxist theory and technological modernization, the working body and its optimization, machine vision and cinematic montage. This workshop proposes, on the one hand, to unearth a genealogy of operativism by engaging with archival research on Soviet film and media theory, and, on the other, to discuss its legacy in the context of materialist analyses of AI as an instrument of labour automation.

Date & Time: Thursday, 05 June 2025 | 14:30–20:00
Location: ICI Berlin, Christinenstr. 18/19, Haus 8, 10119 Berlin
For registration and a full description, visit the event's page.

A collaboration between Marlon Miguel, artist Violett e a. and the seminar "Lygia Clark ́s Participatory Art and the Politics of Memory: A Critical Exploration", by Mona Schieren and Monika Dorniak (Hochschule für Künste Bremen)

Date & Time: Monday, May 26, 2025 | 10:00–16:00
Location: KunstKartell Studio (Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin)
Registration is mandatory: marlon.miguel@uni-weimar.de

This workshop, conceived in dialogue with the on-going Lygia Clark's retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie, examines how her participatory practice—from Caminhando (1963) to Estruturação do Self (1976–88)—activates the body as a phantasmatic space: a permeable, destabilizing field where desire, trauma, and collective memory collide.

Join us on June 10, 2025, at Bauhaus University Weimar for the workshop “Everybody wants to be a fascist”: Media, Milieus, and Affect Politics through a Fascism-Critical Lens. Rather than seeking a fixed definition of fascism, this workshop aims "to discuss its mechanisms and media"—from micropolitics of desire to the affective economies of digital life.

Join us for Elena Vogman’s talk, "Marx’s ‘Sensuous Nature’ in Sergei Eisenstein’s Nonindifferent Nature”, as part of the panel "Proto-ecological Thought after the Socialist Revolution". This event is part of the conference "Marx in the Anthropocene", taking place from March 11–14, 2025, at Iuav University of Venice.

Date & Time: March 11, 2025 | 17:00–19:00
Location: the talk will be held online (find more info on how to attend on the conference's website)

Join us on February 21, 2025, at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (École des arts de la Sorbonne, Room 440, 47 rue des Bergers, 75015 Paris) for a talk by Marlon Miguel as part of the symposium Lygia Clark et les pédagogies d’artistes.

Excerpt from the abstract: "Unlike certain interpretations of Lygia Clark’s work that suggest a radical break between an "artistic" phase and a "clinical" one, this presentation aims to demonstrate that, on the contrary, art, the clinic, and relationality have always been central to her approach. A striking example of this continuity is Pedra e ar, Clark’s first sensory object, which later gave rise to the relational objects. This object was developed following a car accident and a resulting fracture she suffered. From that moment on, her research on objects became characterized by an intimate connection between the body, the object, and the healing process."

Join us on Thursday, February 13, 2025, at 8:30 PM at the New York Hilton Midtown for a talk by Elena Vogman as part of the REFRAMING MADNESS: ARTS AT THE INTERSECTION OF MENTAL HEALTH AND MAD STUDIES session at the CAA Annual Conference. Vogmans talk is titled "Madness, Aesthetics, and Politics – Challenging Primitivism with Tosquelles and Fanon".

Join us on Thursday, February 6, 2025, at 7:00 PM at The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis (81 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY) for an evening exploring the radical legacies of institutional psychotherapy with the launch of "Psychotherapy and Materialism: Essays by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury" (ICI Berlin Press, 2024). This volume presents the first English translations of two seminal texts by Tosquelles and Oury, pioneers who redefined psychiatry as a collective, socially engaged practice.

Co-Editor Elena Vogman will be joined by Perwana Nazif and Christopher Landry to discuss the book’s themes and the enduring impact of institutional psychotherapy today.

Three talks of the online series “Mental Ecologies of Images”, that took place in December 2023, are now available to stream online in our video archive. Co-organized by Elena Vogman, Pawel Moscicki, and Olexii Kuchanskyi, the series consisted in encounters with theorists and scholars working on the subjects related with contemporary visual culture at the intersection with postcolonial discourse, information technology, and critical psychiatry.
Marlon Miguel shares his research on "Images of the Unconscious. Nise da Silveira’s Ecological Psychiatry", Angela Melitopoulos explores "Cine(so)Matic Cartographies", and Matteo Pasquinelli discusses "Mind Ecology in the Age of AI and Knowledge Extractivism".