Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe

13/03/2026

The recording of “Unwalling the Psyche” is now available online:
a conversation between Kader Attia and Wietske Maas as part of the symposium “Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy.”
https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/unwalling-the-psyche/

13/01/2026

The full program for the upcoming symposium on Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: 'To Give Body to an Institution' at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry is online!

With Kader Attia, Camilla Caglioti, Christopher Chamberlin, Sara El Daccache, Carles Guerra, Tobi Haslett, Samia Henni, Samah Jabr, Jean Khalfa, Brigitta Kuster, Karima Lazali, Wietske Maas, Paul Marquis, David Marriott, Marlon Miguel, Marianna Scarfone, Wanderley Santos, Saniya Taher, David Ventura, Elena Vogman, and Robert J. C. Young.

Registration via the ICI website is open: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/frantz-fanons-social-therapy/

11/01/2026

Coming up on January 28:

Thinking Sumud and Clinical Work in extremis with Samah Jabr
A Panel Discussion on War, Transgenerational Trauma, Land Dispossession and On-Going Settler Colonialism, organized and moderated by Camilla Caglioti and Marlon Miguel

January 28, 2026, 19.00-20.30, Spore Initiative
Free admission, in English

09/01/2026

Looking back at the workshop “CHOREO/GRAPHICS: Tracing the Social Body” which took place on October 28, 2025, at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

The workshop explored the corporeal and social dimensions of choreography through exhibition making, embodied practice, performance, lectures, and discussions.

With Aleksandra Selivanova, Carla Petzolt, Elena Vogman, Gwendolyn Lootens, Johannes Muselaers, Jonas Rutgeerts, Marlon Miguel, Mats Werchohlad, Mette Edvardsen, Mona Mahall, Sofia Michel, and Stéphane Symons.

Organized by Marlon Miguel, Johannes Muselaers, Jonas Rutgeerts, Aleksandra Selivanova, Stéphane Symons, and Elena Vogman.
Exhibition design & workshop assistance: Daria Lashutina, Sebastian Veloza; graphic design: Uliana Bychenkova; workshop assistance: Felix Brieden, Christian Scheerhorn.

28/11/2025

Save the Date!

On 29–30 January 2026, we warmly invite you to the symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: “To Give Body to an Institution”.

With Kader Attia, Camilla Caglioti, Christopher Chamberlin, Sara El Daccache, Carles Guerra, Tobi Haslett, Samia Henni, Samah Jabr, Jean Khalfa, Brigitta Kuster, Karima Lazali, Wietske Maas, Paul Marquis, David Marriott, Marlon Miguel, Henning Schmidgen, Marianna Scarfone, Wanderley Santos, Saniya Taher, David Ventura, Elena Vogman, and Robert J. C. Young.

The symposium explores Frantz Fanon’s political, clinical, and aesthetic approach to institutions along three interrelated lines. First, it delves into the impact of Saint-Alban on Fanon’s conception of madness and the institution as both in need of a cure and capable of curing — a sociogenic and phenomenological perspective attentive to embodiment, subjectivity, and history. Second, it turns to his work at Blida-Joinville and Charles-Nicolle, where colonial alienation thwarted the implementation of social therapy, yet where Fanon and his collaborators experimented with media, spatial, and aesthetic practices to propose new forms of collective life. Finally, it considers the legacies of Fanon’s clinical practice, tracing how his insights into the entanglement of psychiatry, politics, and colonial violence continue to inform contemporary understandings of trauma, resistance, and institutional life in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts.

📍 Venue: ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
📅 Dates: 29–30 January 2026
👉 Registration: required (opens 14 January 2026): https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/frantz-fanons-social-therapy/
🖱️more info on Madness, Media, Milieus: https://www.uni-weimar.de/de/medien/professuren/medienwissenschaft/madness-media-milieus/

Organized by Camilla Caglioti, Marlon Miguel, and Elena Vogman,
as part of the research project Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, funded by a Freigeist Fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation), in collaboration with ICI Berlin.

Detailed program coming soon!

The symposium Frantz Fanon’s Social Therapy: ‘To Give Body to an Institution’ explores Frantz Fanon’s political, clinical, and aesthetic approach to institutions along three interrelated lines.

26/11/2025

Don't miss Elena Vogman's Kracauer Lecture for Film and Media Theory on “Geo-Psychiatry: Somatic and Cinematic Milieus of Cure” at Goethe University Frankfurt next week!

Exploring the film and media archives of institutional psychotherapy, Elena traces the relations between therapeutic and environmental aspects of its experimental practices. In contrast to the objectifying scientific or forensic uses of film in psychiatric contexts, these interventions proposed an environmental and participatory approach to mental health care, formative for direct cinema. Their method of géo-psychiatrie redefined “human geography” by fostering patients’ capacity to actively participate in each other’s cure.

⏰ On Tuesday, December 2, 2025, 6:00 pm.
📍 Medienraum, IG Farben-Gebäude 7.214, Campus Westend, Goethe-University Frankfurt.
🎥 A video recording will be available after the event.

Elena Vogman Tuesday 12/02/2025, 6:00 pm Elena Vogman (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) Geo-Psychiatry: Somatic and Cinematic Milieus of Cure A video recording of this lecture will be available after the event. In June 1961, in the French Lozère, two films were shown and discussed with an audience of p...

14/11/2025

Join us on Thursday, November 20 at 16:00 for a talk by Camilla Caglioti and Chiara Vitali, titled “Sortir des murs, réinventer la ville, ‘entrer dehors’: Les photographies de Fabrizio Borelli aux archives du Santa Maria della Pietà à Rome.”

Co-authored and presented by Camilla Caglioti (PhD researcher of the project "Madness, Media, Milieus") and Chiara Vitali (Museum Curator at the Institut national du patrimoine and PhD researcher in Art History at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University), this talk is part of the international conference "Pictures of Madness: Uses of Photography in Psychiatry (19th–21st centuries)", taking place in Paris on November 20 and 21 at the Maison Suger–FMSH (16 rue Suger, 75006 Paris).

Dear Hmadness readers, We are happy to share the programme of the international conference Pictures of madness: uses of photography in psychiatry (19th–21st centuries) that will take place in …

27/10/2025

‘Alienation here is understood not as an individual phenomena but as based on social relations born from the “inter-projection” of private property. […] It is with this notion of alienation in mind that Tosquelles rejects a therapeutic practice based on an interiorized understanding of consciousness, arguing instead that the “the patient’s concrete society is itself the sick individual.” Treatment must consist in the “dis-alienation of the total fact of madness: the sick person, the asylum, and the psychiatrist at once.”’

Thank you Janna Graham for your subtle and extensive discussion of Psychotherapy and Materialism: Essays by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury, edited by Marlon Miguel and Elena Vogman with ICI Press Berlin (https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-31) on e-flux notes. Read the review in two parts:

“The patient’s concrete society is itself the sick individual”: Review of Psychotherapy and Materialism, Part 1: https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783409/the-patient-s-concrete-society-is-itself-the-sick-individual-review-of-psychotherapy-and-materialism-part-1

“The patient’s concrete society is itself the sick individual”: Review of Psychotherapy and Materialism, Part 2: https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783410/the-patient-s-concrete-society-is-itself-the-sick-individual-review-of-psychotherapy-and-materialism-part-2

Janna Graham reviews Psychotherapy and Materialism: Essays by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury (2024), edited by Elena Vogman and Marlon Miguel. Part one of two.

25/10/2025

Tuesday, Oct. 28, join our workshop: “CHOREO/GRAPHICS: TRACING THE SOCIAL BODY,” Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Oberlichtsaal, 10am to 6pm!

With Aleksandra Selivanova, Carla Petzolt, Elena Vogman, Gwendolyn Lootens, Johannes Muselaers, Jonas Rutgeerts, Marlon Miguel, Mats Werchohlad, Mette Edvardsen, Mona Mahall, Sofia Michel, Stéphane Symons.

While choreography is commonly understood as the organisation of movement in time and space, it originally emerged as dance notation — the art of describing danced movement on paper. The workshop “Choreo/graphics: Tracing the Social Body” revisits the notion of choreography through the lens of drawing and its social potential. Using case studies from the Soviet and Weimar Republic avant-gardes, as well as from contemporary practices of “expanded choreography,” the workshop explores the emancipatory and transformative power of drawing when dance notation engages the social body. In this context, choreographic drawing — simultaneously prescribing gesture and opening up movement’s potential — becomes the site where individual tracings (as inscription, drawing, or writing) intersect with collective spatial imagination, reshaping the Umwelt of moving forms.

Organized by Marlon Miguel, Jonas Rutgeerts, Aleksandra Selivanova, Stéphane Symons, and Elena Vogman, in the context of the Disegni: Research Network on Autonomous Drawing, funded by the FWO—Research Foundation Flanders, and Counterpoint: Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Contemporary Dance (KU Leuven) in collaboration with the Freigeist Project “Madness, Media, Milieus" funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and the DFG Project “Animismus/Maschinismus” at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

Exhibition design & workshop assistance: Daria Lashutina, Sebastian Veloza; graphic design: Uliana Bychenkova; workshop assistance: Felix Brieden, Christian Scheerhorn.

Poster design: Uliana Bychenkova 💙

15/10/2025

We are delighted to announce the publication of Stella do Patrocínio's "Falatório/Chatter", edited by Iracema Dulley and Marlon Miguel.

"Falatório/Chatter" delves into the life and work of Stella do Patrocínio (1941–1992), who was confined in Rio de Janeiro’s Colônia Juliano Moreira psychiatric asylum from the age of twenty-one until her death. The unique form of relentless speech that Do Patrocínio produced while institutionalized was dismissed by doctors as mere ‘logorrhoea’. Yet her falatório is far more: a defiant and poetic act that resists erasure by psychiatry, racism, and patriarchy. Drawing on a wide range of archival material, this book presents transcriptions of Do Patrocínio’s chatter in Portuguese and English, amplifying her voice as a testament to survival, power, and resistance.

The book is published by ICI Berlin Press and available in open access, as well as in paperback and hardcover editions. Download it here: https://press.ici-berlin.org/catalogue/doi/10.37050/ci-35.

01/10/2025

Today and tomorrow (October 1–2, 2025), the international symposium "Lygia Clark: Artistic Practice in Transcultural Contexts" will take place at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin. Organized on the occasion of the first German retrospective of Lygia Clark at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the event will bring together international scholars and practitioners to discuss Clark’s radical artistic practice and its transcultural resonance across art history, theory, pedagogy, psychiatry, and contemporary art.

We are especially delighted to highlight the contribution of "Madness, Media, Milieus" Co-PI Marlon Miguel, who will give a talk entitled:

“Preuve du réel: Relational Situations between Art and Clinic”
🗓 Thursday, October 2, 2025
🕙 10:00 AM

For more information and the full program, please visit the conference page:

International Symposium  1-2 October 2025Lygia Clark: Artistic Practice in Transcultural Contexts On the occasion of the first retrospective ...