With contributions by Sacha Craddock, Lizaveta van Munsteren, Raluca Soreanu, Ana Tomčić, Ewan O’Neill & Julianna Pusztai
This book unfolds between art and psychoanalysis. It showcases Ana Čvorović’s exhibition Fog and offers insights into a collective process where art and psychoanalysis are in dialogue. Through Fog, we meet a world of fragments, an intricate play on walls, transparency, opacity, inside and outside, the positions of doctor and patient, but also fragility and psychic suffering. In these pages, we invite you to step into this world, and to also experience the creative process of researchers of the FREEPSY collective, who engage Ana and her work. We offer a composition of text and images that traces the ways in which the unconscious is at the heart of how we think and create. The productivity of the unconscious is part of our method.
This book is the fruit of transdisciplinary forms of experimentation. The research collective FREEPSY has worked together since 2023, with sustained curiosity about what psychoanalysis can do when it becomes entangled with other knowledges and practices, and even with activist or emancipatory movements. The core work of FREEPSY focuses on free and low-cost psychoanalytic clinics around the world, their practices and legacies, and on a socially-engaged psychoanalysis. Ana Čvorović is part of the FREEPSY research collective, as Artist-Researcher, and engages in her sculpture work the ideas that come up in the explorations of psychoanalysts, historians, psychosocial scholars and archivists at FREEPSY. When we encountered each other, her sculpture and installation world was already engaging themes related to memory, trauma, displacement and the unconscious.
This book came about in the aftermath of the exhibition Fog, curated by Sacha Craddock, which was shown on the occasion of the Psychoanalysis and Radical Psychiatry conference, held at the Wellcome Collection in London, in November 2024. The conference was organised collaboratively by the FREEPSY research collective and the Psychosis Therapy Project. Holding a sculpture exhibition on the site of a conference on madness and society was an event in itself and it generated many vibrant conversations across fields of knowledge: from psychiatry, to psychoanalysis, to history, art, social theory and film-making.
The book is available in open access format here.
Please get in touch with the FREEPSY team if you would like a paper copy of Fog.
