Maurizio Lazzarato

As part of the exhibition Critical Episodes (1957-2011). MACBA Collection, Level 2 of the Museum presents two new episodes of the MACBA Collection. One of these episodes is Déconnage, a video-essay by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato that looks at the life and work of the psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles (1912-1994). In Déconnage, one of the pioneers of critical psychiatry in post-war Europe is introduced. Anti-psychiatry is recovered here through the figure of Francesc Tosquelles: a discourse and practice that address not mental illnesses, but vital, social and ethical problems. Anti-psychiatry foresaw the dysfunctions that would eventually afflict people in contemporary societies.

A visual research project reexamining the ideas of the philosopher and psychiatrist Félix Guattari on animismic culture as a form of collective subjectivity (collective assemblages of enunciation), as well as the time in his life when he tried to lay a foundation for a fundamental critique of modernist concepts. In an interview recorded during the Gulf War (1991), Guattari spoke of the emergence of a geography of resistance that arises especially where postcolonial systems are declining. A new de-centered, animistic subjectivity is central for rethinking “the Object, the Other as a potential bearer of dimensions of partial subjectivity, if need be through neurotic phenomena, religious rituals, or aesthetic phenomena."