Dr. Carles Guerra (Visiting Professor in Catalan Studies, CEMS)

Introduced by

Edward Dioguardi (NYU, American Folk Art Museum)

Respondent:

Camille Robcis (Columbia University)

Based on years of research about Francesc Tosquelles (1912-1994), a Catalan psychiatrist working in the early 20th-century, Carles Guerra will present a talk on the large scale exhibition he curated on Tosquelles for several European institutions. A new installament of this acclaimed exhibition will open at the American Folk Art Museum next spring in NYC.

As part of this project, Guerra is working to preserve Tosquelles’s library, personal archive and filmography. His talk draws on his experiece as both a curator and scholar working on the centrality of Southern European influences (more precisely, Catalan political innovations in in the domain of civil society) at the source of radical transformations in Postwar France.

Pre-Event Screening 5:00 pm:

Watching Tosquelles Films

A work in progress by Carles Guerra based on five reels previously assembled by Tosquelles:

Suite en noir - Congrès et voyages (1 and 2), Venezuela 1967 and Mexico 1967 (1 and 2). 2022, 37 minutes.

As a prologue to the lecture on the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles (Reus 1912- Granges-sur-Lot, 1994) and his legacy, the screening of Watching Tosquelles Films offers the possibility to see Tosquelles filming with his 8mm Paillard camera that he acquired in 1953. The absence of sound has been filled in with intertitles that provide clues that help us recreate who might be filmed, where and when. These are images that in spite of their muted character reveal the extraordinary network that constituted the bulk of institutional psychotherapy in the French Postwar period, including figures like Frantz Fanon, George Daumézon and Jean Oury.

This composite film has been edited by Carles Guerra out of five reels shot by Tosquelles between 1953 and 1967 and preserved by his son up until very recently. The film is in itself a material to see through and to think along with as part of an ongoing research restoring Tosquelles' influence.