Déconnage
Angela Melitopoulos mit Maurizio Lazzarato
Déconnage, 2011
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.
GF0031252.00.0-2012
Artwork text
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.