Francesc Tosquelles – Learning From Madness

foto: Talia Romero

We are trying out from on tomorrow a guided tour per day, in English and Spanish, at 12:00 pm. First there will be a general introduction to the project and then there will be a more detailed and informal tour to each of the archive rooms. This is made thanks to the very generous collaboration of the AECID interns in the pavilion- and I am very thankful to them!

Also, please mind that on Friday 8th July 11:00 we will enjoy de visit of Maurizio Lazzaratto, to talk with me and with Marco Baravalle on the very fundamental, but what a shame almost forgotten, Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles.

As well, to give you a taste of the guided tour, this is the draft we wrote today together with the interns:

I

The fundamental idea of The Inadequate, the project occupying the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, is to turn around the traditional function of a national pavilion- to show the excellence of the arts of a certain country- and instead use the pavilion as a place for research of the actual context where this pavilion is placed.

“The Inadequate” (the marginal, the dissident, the radical, the abnormal) is a constant issue in the work of Dora García, and here it is used as a starting point from which to research the Italian cultural scene.

The Inadequate is an extended performance, initiated by Dora García and counting more than 80 performers. It is made of objects, conversations, monologues, theatre, silences and debate. The protagonists of this multiple, collective performance, spanning several generations, with a strong accent in the Italian scene as an object of research, are experts in the notion of ‘inadequacy’. They represent independent, underground, dissident, unofficial, marginal and exiled positions.

The performance and its archive evolve each day of the Biennial, and last the whole duration of it, 6 months. The program of this performance can be consulted at the entrance on the poster, in the performance guide, and in the internet site theinadequate.net.

II

The pavilion consist of three parts: the central stage, where most of the chapters of the performance happen; three large rooms with an archive, and two projection rooms.

The three rooms with archives are two traditional archive rooms and a room occupied by the work “Instant Narrative” (Dora García, 2006).

III

The reason of the presence of this work, “Instant Narrative”, is that, being impossible to record all the complexity of the performance, Dora García has chosen “Instant Narrative” to be the only documentation of the performance The Inadequate. Instant Narrative consists of an observer writing on her laptop everything she perceives during all the opening hours of the pavilion, creating an infinite text that is archived in the memory of the laptop.

So Instant Narrative is the text archive of The Inadequate.

IV

In the two lateral rooms, there is an archive of objects and documents. What links them together is the use they have in the performance. All the objects you see in this archive have been used by or are a reference for one of the 45 chapters of the performance.

The archive is organized around:

– Three points: the sliced book Ulysses (Dora García 1999), the series of objects “The Beggar’s Things” (Dora García, 2007) and the book “Teatro dell Mostre”, related to the exhibition with the same name held at Galeria Tartaruga in Rome in 1968. Same as in this pavilion, each day of that exhibiton a different artist took the stage.

– Four artists, fundamental in relation to the idea of “Inadequacy” in the italian art scene: Gianfranco Baruchello, Fabio Mauri, Francesco Matarrese, and Emilio Prini.

– Four writers: Robert Walser, James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Roberto Bazlen.

V

And then we have the projection rooms. In these two rooms there are two videos, complementary but independent. The first one was filmed in 2010 and the second in 2011, specifically for this presentation.

The Deviant Majority (from Basaglia to Brazil) follows the path of Venezian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, from the Law he managed to promote, elliminating psychiatric hospital and the concept of social dangerousness, to his travel to Brazil and the particular revolution happening there. In the second video, The Inadequate (Joyce, Psychoanalisis, Trieste), we turn back from São Paulo to Trieste to follow the birth of Leopold Bloom and Ulysses, modelled after the writer Italo Svevo and the background of the psychoanalisis coming from Vienna.

We can now go through a description of the different objects in the vitrines.