Dr. Elena Vogman | Freigeist-Fellowship of the VolkswagenStiftung

Media form and transform our milieus, from geopolitical landscapes to our most intimate environs. As spaces in-between those milieus mediate, shape and design our psychic and imaginary spaces, they condition the possibilities of our movements and our expectations. They offer a realm of experimentation, in which a particular construction of the future is continuously reinvented. In this sense media also mediate temporal milieus envisioned as spaces in-between: milieus of negotiation between present and future, between memories and lived events.

This project studies a series of media and milieu practices initiated in different settings of Institutional Psychotherapy since the 1940s. It examines efforts to produce environments, institutions, and milieus that would facilitate processes of psychological therapy and healing, in particular by psychiatrists and activists such as François Tosquelles, Gisela Pankow, Jean Oury, Anne Querrien, Ginette Michaud, Fernand Deligny, Frantz Fanon and Félix Guattari.

Institutional psychotherapy was an eminently political movement, originating during the German Occupation of France, when between 40,000 and 80,000 patients fell prey to a policy of extermination geared towards the mentally ill promoted by the Nazi State and silently endorsed by the Vichy Regime.¹ Resisting this form of physical and political violence during the war, and consequently turning its attention to the institutional and social problems that shape mental health issues, the practices of institutional psychotherapy operated at the intersection of environmental, medical, cultural and social dimensions. It instituted a radically horizontal collective of patients, workers, and doctors, and developed media-therapeutic processes, that aimed to transform the inner and outer milieus of psychic illnesses.

Media produce and modify milieus: This is the overarching hypothesis that is reflected in three individual sub-projects (see ‘People’). With recourse to a wide range of unpublished documents, images, and films, the project explores how these milieu-constructing experiments were realized through an intense, multifaceted use of media, social and aesthetic practices: the collective production of periodicals, films, animations, and maps, the performing of plays, the exhibiting of works, produced in collaborations between patients and artists, as well as the establishment of workshops and ateliers. By drawing on intensive archival work, the project foregrounds not a conventional history of ideas, but rather a constellation of scientific and media-historical case studies, developed on the basis of concrete practices, their material processes and their attendant theoretical constructs. 

Moreover, the project posits the constitution of a ‘migrant work’ (Tosquelles) and its theory contending that such practices have evolved from the exigency of specific local circumstances and the involuntary displacements resulting from war and political persecution. The practitioners, compelled by these circumstances, consistently migrated, engendering a continual transformation of their reflections. The study delves into the subsequent evolution of these discourses and practices, emphasizing their newfound relevance in contexts extending beyond Europe. One focal point is the utilization of collective and media-milieu practices in the setting of the Blida-Joinville clinic in Algeria by Frantz Fanon. Here, Fanon pioneered a decolonization of clinical techniques, concurrently formulating concepts that elucidate the nexus between colonial violence and madness. Another case study examines the pioneering work of Brazilian doctor Nise da Silveira, the founder of the Museum of Images from the Unconscious, who integrated aesthetic practices into psychiatric treatment, particularly for patients diagnosed as psychotic. While her work aligns temporally with Institutional Psychotherapy, it uniquely situated image production at the core of its clinical method, taking a radical stance against any form of medicalized approach.

Analyzing these experimental psychiatric techniques and their contexts as primary sources for now-canonical theoretical and philosophical texts, the project also provokes and critically challenges the epistemic ground of our humanities, politicizing the way this fragile foundation came to be constituted and the forces which contributed to it.

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¹ Bueltzingsloewen, Isabelle von, L’Hécatombe des fous. La famine dans les hôpitaux psychiatriques français sous l'Occupation (Paris: Flammarion, 2009); Castelli, André, L'abandon à la mort... de 76000 fous par le régime de Vichy suivi de Un hôpital psychiatrique sous Vichy (1940-1945) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012); Lafont, Max, L’extermination douce (Lormont: Le Bord de l'Eau, 2000).

“Film is an art of the milieu, indeed to a significantly greater degree than theatre”, wrote the psychologist and linguist Karl Bühler (1879–1963) in 1932. “In contrast to the classical drama with its unity of time and place, cinematographic montage produces a ‘unity of a different kind’: the ‘unity of the milieu’”.¹ This axis elaborates on the notions of “milieu”, “Umwelt”, “environment” emphasizing its relation to “media” and “technicity”.

While National Socialism largely drove holistic and milieu-oriented approaches to biology, ethology, and psychology out of the German-speaking lands, they soon took hold in other parts of Europe. Postwar France’s critical climate gave rise to an array of experimental psychiatric practices aimed at fabricating a milieu allowing mental health patients to unfold their lives as fully as possible. While the “institutional psychotherapy” developed at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital and La Borde clinic prioritized the analysis of the institution as a prerequisite for individual treatment, Fernand Deligny (1913–1996) moved beyond institutional settings. He established a network that provided support for non-verbal children diagnosed with autism, whom he described as existing in another “mode of being”. In parallel, Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) developed a critical ethnopsychiatry that examined colonialism’s effects through the lens of Kurt Goldstein’s (1878–1965) and François Tosquelles’s (1912–1994) holistic approaches. 

Deligny’s speculation, in particular, showed how the camera produces, installs, and assembles heterogeneous milieus, functioning as sites for experimentation. These spaces were neither strictly pedagogical nor clinical; rather, they served as collective, quasi-anthropological research settings against normalization. For Deligny’s network, cinema is both central and marginal—integral to his projects yet not vital to their survival. Its inclusion opens a space for experimentation, where the energy invested in cinematographic practices is not necessarily directed toward producing a finished film-object. Instead, this energy feeds the processes surrounding filmmaking, processes deeply connected to other activities in his attempts, such as hosting delinquents and involving them in work, or living with children diagnosed with autism and baking bread together. Through this lens, the network’s use of cinema and media becomes an integral part of a broader strategy to reconfigure both the milieu and the relationships within it.

These milieu-constructing experiments were realized through an intense, multifaceted use of media: through a series of local and material practices of mediation that shaped the history of the humanities in postwar Europe in striking ways.

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¹ Bühler, Karl, “Sprache und Kino”, Talk from 1932, The Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), Moscow, 1923-2-235, pp. 1–48.

Associated events and publications:

• Madness, Media, Milieus. Félix Guattari in Context
• Assembling Milieus Working the Camera after Fernand Deligny
• Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Year 51
• Camering: Fernand Deligny On Cinema And The Image, edited and with an introduction by Marlon Miguel with a postface by Elena Vogman (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2022)

“Geo-psychiatry” referred to a series of mobile therapeutic practices conducted outside of the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban in the French Lozère. Its genealogy goes back to the socialist and feminist psychiatrist Agnès Masson (1900–1993) in the 1930s. It was later developed in the frame of institutional psychotherapy (1940s–1960s) paving the way to “sector psychiatry”, which was established in France in 1960.

This axis explores the theory and practice of géo-psychiatrie and its environmental approach to mental healthcare which bridged the hospital and its—ecological, social, mental—surroundings and encouraged an understanding of psychiatry as a “migrant work”. Based on texts and a series of archival documents, including therapeutic objects such as films, embroideries, sculptures, and journals produced by patients and mental health workers, this axis aims: first, to reconstruct geo-psychiatry as it emerged both as a therapeutic instrument and a practice of resistance during the Occupation. Second, it analyzes the way how the media and milieu practices developed in the frame of geo-psychiatry politicized the debate on “human geography” from below—as concrete and situated interventions. They questioned society’s politics of space, which embraced the concentrationary modes of confinement. Third, it examines the ways in which geo-psychiatric thinking and practice were differently carried forward through approaches such as Frantz Fanon’s (1925–1961) social therapy at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria and Fernand Deligny’s (1913–1996) network for individuals diagnosed with autism in the French Cévennes. It studies the ways how media, such as film, photography, printing, and cartography, served to collectively re-invent the relation between “geo”, the earth, and mental healthcare: to produce environments, institutions, and milieus that would facilitate psychological therapy and healing. Fourth, the axis situates geo-psychiatry as both a decolonial and environmental approach to clinical practice and a process of social repurposing of technology. This perspective connects the current debates on art, media, and environmentality on one hand, and the framework of applied and critical humanities on the other.

Associated events and publications:

• Learning with Madness. François Tosquelles and the Invention of Institutional Psychotherapy
• Reducing Climate
• Instituting Care: Psychotherapy and Materialism

Psychiatrist Nise da Silveira (1905–1999) founded the Museum of Images from the Unconscious in the late 1940s within Pedro II Psychiatric Hospital in Rio de Janeiro. Alongside her work in the asylum, Da Silveira established Casa das Palmeiras (House of the Palm Trees) in 1956. She envisioned it as a “free territory” with open doors, where distinctions between patients, doctors, and nurses were intentionally blurred. This space became central to her critique of the psychiatric institution and its inhuman measures (electroshocks, insulin cures, straight-jackets, etc.), demonstrating that by isolating patients, hospitals often reinforced and crystallized pathology. Resonating with debates within institutional psychotherapy, the concept of “milieu” (meio) played a significant role in her reasoning.

In 1947, art critic Mário  Pedrosa (1900–1981) wrote “The Vital Need for Art”¹ for an exhibition featuring works by Da Silveira’s patients: Raphael Domingues (1913–1979), Carlos Pertuis (1910–1977), Lúcio Noeman (1915–1992), and Adelina Gomes (1916–1984). While Pedrosa’s text engaged with questions similar to those explored by figures like Jean Oury (1924–2014), Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933), Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985), and Harald Szeemann (1933–2005)—such as the relevance of Gestalt theory and surrealism, the fascination with productions by “untrained” individuals, critiques of artistic academicism, the apparent spontaneity of these creations, and the centrality of the concept of “expression”—his conclusions diverged radically from those of his European counterparts. He delineated creative activity along two fundamental dimensions: first, as a form of mediation between the subject and the external world, and second, as a vital experiment with and confrontation of reality.

This axis seeks to critically re-evaluate the relationship between art and madness as it developed in the Brazilian context. On one hand, it examines the theoretical contributions of figures like Pedrosa, Flávio de Carvalho (1899–1973), and Osório César (1895–1979). On the other, it explores the concrete practices of artists navigating the border between art and clinical work, such as Lygia Clark (1920–1988), alongside the works of psychiatrized individuals like Stella do Patrocínio (1941–1992), Adelina Gomes, and Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1909/1911–1989). These productions, in particular, challenge conventional understandings of representation, raising new questions about how psychiatrized subjects critically engage with and articulate their lived experiences. In particular, they help shedding light on the intersection of gender, race, class, and mental health within post-slavery Brazil’s psychiatric system.

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¹ Mário Pedrosa, Mário Pedrosa: Primary Documents (New York: MoMA, 2015).

Associated events and publications:

• Bichos Animal Fantasies between Art and Madness

• Stella do Patrocínio, Falatório/Chatter, ed. by Iracema Dulley and Marlon Miguel, forthcoming book (2025)

The publication of Frantz Fanon’s (1925–1961) psychiatric writings¹ marks a significant turning point not only in the history of critical psychiatry but also in how we approach the theory and history of anti-colonial and decolonial thought. These writings reveal Fanon’s crucial engagement with “institutional psychotherapy”, a clinical and antifascist movement that emerged in France in response to the extermination policies targeting psychiatric patients. For Fanon, reading colonial violence through the prism of mental illness led to an understanding of “madness” as a “pathology of freedom”. This axis analyses Fanon’s key decolonial concepts, focusing on their entanglement with the methods and tools of institutional psychotherapy. Central to this exploration are two pivotal “scenes”: Fanon’s collaboration with revolutionary psychiatrist François Tosquelles (1912–1994) at the Saint-Alban psychiatric clinic in Lozère (1952–1953), and his subsequent implementation and transformation of institutional psychotherapy at the Blida-Joinville clinic in Algeria (1953–1956). This analysis will also delve into the role of various media and artistic practices—filmmaking, photography, writing, publishing, drawing, and sculpture—in shaping the “milieus of healing” crucial to the practices of both Fanon and Tosquelles.

This axis also extends its scope to contemporary debates and artistic works that draw on Fanon’s legacy to interrogate the persistence of racism and coloniality. This includes the works of Sylvia Wynter (1928–), Fred Moten (1962–), Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), and Christina Sharpe (1965–). Sharpe, in particular, emphasizes that slavery was not merely an event but a singularity—a pervasive climate or weather pattern that continues to reproduce itself under certain conditions.² She critiques the underlying logic of ostensibly “democratic” societies, exposing their structural foundation in anti-blackness and their continual reproduction of the logics of slavery and the plantation.

Finally, this axis considers artistic works that are counterpoints to this atmosphere of anti-blackness. For example, Abdias Nascimento (1914–2011) and his engagement with Quilombismo (1980). In this painting, Nascimento employs the colors of the pan-Africanist flag alongside representations of the orishas Exu and Ogum, invoking a political project aimed at anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-neo-colonial reorganization of governance. His work proposes a transformative vision that challenges the enduring structures of racial and colonial oppression.

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¹ Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom (2015/2018, ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young)

² Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 76.

Associated events and publications:

• The “Pathology of Freedom”: Colonialism and Psychiatry after Frantz Fanon (Seminar at Parrhesia: School of Philosophy, Berlin)
• Introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Decolonial Psychiatry: Art, Media and the Politics of Madness (Seminar at Universität der Künste, Berlin)

This axis examines the tension between institutionalization and deinstitutionalization within alternative psychiatry movements from the 1950s to 1970s: the Italian psichiatria democratica, the Algerian and French psychothérapie institutionelle, the British anti-psychiatry, and the Brazilian movimento antimanicomial. It investigates how these movements navigated the dual challenge of dismantling existing institutions—both physical structures such as psychiatric hospitals and cultural constructs such as societal perceptions of madness—while creating new spaces and practices that avoid reproducing the systemic violence of traditional psychiatric frameworks.

The Italian movement psichiatria democratica, for example, championed deep deinstitutionalization, culminating in the Law 180/1978 (the “Basaglia Law”), which mandated the closure of psychiatric hospitals and promoted the opening of small local centers. Conversely, the movement of institutional psychotherapy criticized the rigid “establishments” seeking to reinvent institutions from within rather than abolishing hospitals. Experiments at sites like La Borde, Saint-Alban, and Blida-Joinville fostered therapeutic communities where patients and staff collaborated through shared responsibility, dialogue, and creativity, redefining institutions as potential spaces of resistance and care.

These divergent approaches were often framed as a dichotomy: while the Italian and Brazilian movements emphasized the institution’s “outside”—the city, the community, broader political dimensions—, the French movement limited itself to its “inside”. Moving beyond such dichotomies, this axis proceeds by investigating a series of archival case studies and concrete media practices that navigate the dynamic between institutionalization and deinstitutionalization. What are the means and the media of deinstitutionalization? Which spatial (architectural, urban), aesthetic (perceptual, artistic) and social interventions did these interventions include and provoke? What concepts and models of space and bodily circulation emerged in the process of instituting and deinstituting? How did these interventions transform the relations between the institutions and their surroundings through the instituting of collective practices, such as parties and carnivals? How did these events in their processuality contribute to a destigmatization of madness?

By exploring these questions, the axis aims to illuminate the historical significance of these movements and their relevance to debates in the humanities about the intertwined dimensions of mental health, social justice, and the politics of care.

Associated events and publications:

• Learning with Madness. François Tosquelles and the Invention of Institutional Psychotherapy

• Instituting Care: Psychotherapy and Materialism