Tosquelles: a hallucinating exhibit
Editorial of the Council of Writing

[Automatic translation from Catalan]:

1 Tosquelles was born in Reus in 1912. He studied medicine in Barcelona, specialty in Psychiatry […] He soon joined the Pere Mata Institute in Reus, the local asylum. […]. «Only by curing hospitals can cure the sick», he will say. […] In this sense, the Tosquelles psychiatry was an experimental and avant-garde psychiatry, friendly and demanding at the same time, in the antipodals of the Eighty-hundry psychiatry. […] At the end of the Spanish War, the doctor goes into exile in France. […] He focuses his work at the Hospital Centre Saint-Alban. There he polishes his theses, implements them fully and becomes an influential psychiatrist (today, the center bears his name: Centre Hospitalier François-Tosquelles). Let us say that Saint-Alban will be his great work. A kind of oasis where psychiatry is no longer a cold discipline, an impersonal treatment. The attention to the inmates will be exemplary, respectful, egalitarian. Masó2 explains that during World War II and the subsequent Nazi occupation France will die 40,000 mentally ill:

The «sweet extermination» is called because they were allowed to die, not attended; it was lived as a national hecatomb. In Saint-Alban, however, no one died; in this sense, the vision that exists today is that of a mythical place”.


1 Gerard E. Mur, Faves Tendres #68 17/05/2021, Núvol, the digital culture. http://www.nuvol.com

2 Joana Masó, Tosquelles. Curar les institucions, Barcelona: Arcàdia, 2021

Exhibitions

Until 28 August 2022 at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

Other locations where the exposure will be set

  • Les Abattoirs. Musée FRAC Occitanie, Toulouse (until 6 March 2022)
  • Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (27 September 2022 – March 2023)
  • American Folk Art Museum in New York (April – October 2023)

Editorial

[Automatic translation from Catalan]:
Editorial of the Council of Writing:

Who’s Tosquelles?
Some exposure taste
1 – Received Land, Cultural Grass
2 – Group Therapy
3 – Exile is a trauma transmitted[…]

Council of Writing
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