News

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".

We are delighted to announce the publication of "Psychotherapy and Materialism", edited by Marlon Miguel and Elena Vogman as part of the project "Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe". The volume features the first English translations of pivotal texts by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury, co-founders of institutional psychotherapy—a revolutionary movement born during World War II in resistance to confinement systems reminiscent of colonial and totalitarian practices. Grounded in materialist and collective approaches to mental health, institutional psychotherapy reimagined psychiatric care through the ‘treatment of the institution’ itself. The book is available as an open access publication by ICI Press and can be found following the link.

We are excited to announce that Elena Vogman and Marlon Miguel will be speaking at the conference Psychoanalysis, Schizoanalysis, and Pluralism: Perspectives From Latin America, taking place on November 30, 2024. Elena Vogman will present "Bichos, or Undoing Institutions with Lygia Clark and Stella Do Patrocínio", while Marlon Miguel will deliver his talk "Against the Police-related Psychiatry: Stella Do Patrocínio's Falatório". Click "more" for the full conference schedule as well as a Zoom link for online participation.