Between May 29th and 31st, the FREEPSY team will be participating in the Caring Futures Conference in Paris, where we will join other artists, activists and scholars to discuss the transformation and revolutionary potential in historical and current health care practices in order to work out alternative futures for care within different communities.
Care is an emerging and contentious focus across the disciplines emphasizing exclusions in care realities–such as the lack of economic and social support for some care relations, the denial of care, the weaponizing of care, the exploitative conditions of care work, and the privileging of normative hierarchies across the globe. As analysts, artists and researchers working on clinics whose main focus is the provision of care to excluded populations, we hope to make a valuable contribution to this conversation.
Our team will be presenting a creative panel on the practices and utopias within psychoanalytic free clinics and care infrastructures. The panel brings together an interdisciplinary collective – including psychosocial researchers, psychoanalysts, cultural historians and an artist. Within the spaces of free clinics, where therapists offer psychoanalysis to marginalised individuals and groups, there has always been the attempt to rethink the institutional framework and, in doing so, to redefine the future of mental health care in a way that involves the power of the unconscious and of fantasy. Our panel will ask a series of interrelated questions, navigating the space between the practices and utopias of free psychoanalytic clinics.
What kind of infrastructural thinking takes shape in the free clinics and what can psychoanalytic infrastructures do in terms of considering race, class or coloniality? If we focus on contemporary clinics of the Global South, is there a dialogue emerging between psychoanalysis and Latin-American critical thought on public and collective health? If we focus on psychoanalytic work with children and young people in historical therapeutic communities, what are the implications in terms of rethinking the social bond and what consequences does this have for arranging the living space within these communities? Can we artistically refigure the boundaries of psychoanalysis, imagining it to have translucent walls? What kind of care is possible in a world populated with translucent walls?
The panel will bring together three individual presentations by our researchers Ana Minozzo, Raluca Soreanu and Ana Tomčiċ as well as a sculpture by the artist Ana Čvorović, which she will discuss with her collaborator Julianna Pusztai. Transitions between the papers will be staged by our colleague Lizaveta van Munsteren. We invite all researchers, artists, activists, carers, clinicians and health care professionals to join us for what is bound to be both a productive and rewarding experience!
You can register for the event here: https://my.aup.edu/payment/CARINGFUTURES
