Video installation, color, sound, 62 min,
integrated archival table
With: Jean-Claude Polack (psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Paris),
Elisabeth von Samsonow (philosopher, Wien I Vienna);
François Tosquelles, Video interview with François Tosquelles
(1985) by François Pain, Jean-Claude Polack,
Danielle Sivadon
Edition: 1/3 + 2 A.P.
Déconnage is an extension of the installation Assemblages, with an archival
and video work about the Catalan psychiatrist and member of the Resistance
François Tosquelles. It shows the philosopher Elisabeth von Samsonow
(Vienna) and the psychiatrist Jean-Claude Polack (Paris) viewing and commenting on a video of an interview with Tosquelles. Through a side-by-side
montage of the three interviews Déconnage interlinks the moment the interview
with Tosquelles was recorded (1985) with the contemporary perspective
on his ideas (2011). The setting resembles a virtual philosophical-psychoanalytic
session. The video interview is a dynamic material, a psychomotoric
assemblage that includes gestures, the gaze, the interval, etc. This materiality
becomes just as crucial to the interruptions and elaborations as the words.
Tosquelles positioned himself as a Marxist and Freudian but continually
extended the limits of psychoanalysis. Elisabeth von Samsonow links
Tosquelles’s position to that of feminism. Like Samsonow, Polack believes
that François Tosquelles’s positioning himself as a perennial stranger allowed
his revolutionary practice to lead him to the networking practices that made
Saint-Alban not only the first open psychiatric clinic in Europe but also a
hiding place for the Resistance during World War II.
