Transfer

The video ‘Passing Drama’ reflects the acoustic image of Melitopoulos' family history. It tells the refugee story of her Greek family that came across three generations as a fragmentary and fairy-tale-like image. Flight as the fundamental motif of the story became the videographic theme of narrative, history and memory.

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."

An attempt to translate Walter Benjamin's theory "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man" into a montage using images from Tokyo's hightech amusement parks and artificial environments: precisely calculated acceleration and merry-go-round machines, sophisticated wave pools affecting bodies with promethic rhythms – how does the language of man and the language of things read in relation to the industrial development of hightech amusement parks and the calculability of sky-reaching affects? (Angela Melitopoulos) „There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents on language as such and on the language of man.“ (Walter Benjamin: "On the Language as Such and on the Language of Man")

Inherently political, the three films that constitute Muster (Rushes) (2012) visually link to one another, with each roughly half-hour narrative (79 minutes combined for the single-channel version) taking place at a former Benedictine monastery outside of Kassel, Germany. This monastery functioned as a concentration camp during the Nazi era, a reformatory for girls in the 1970s, and later a psychiatric clinic.