OUR MIND MAPS

As a research collective of nine, bringing together psychosocial scholars, psychoanalysts, historians, literary and cultural scholars, an artist, an archivist, and a cultural sector worker, we are exploring fruitful ways of translating and exchanging our different knowledge forms, and also ways of making something together. 

One of our practices in the collective is that of converging around ‘Object Days’, where we all respond to the same chosen ‘object’, drawing on our own disciplines, theoretical anchors, sites of fieldwork, or clinical experiences. During the ‘object days’, we all write short pieces, free-associate with references, or bring material objects that we would like others to respond to. Two of our objects so far have been the psychoanalytic couch and the clock.

Our ‘Object Days’ are committed to a kind of material archaeology, encompassing the activity of accumulating fragments of historical experience, often dismissed as insignificant or unassimilable. Our ‘Object Days’ are also driven by the wish to work alongside the sculpture and installation artist who is part of our collective, Ana Čvorović, and to take seriously the material dimensions of both her artistic practice and of our own research practice.

The mind maps below are a way of capturing some of the work we do together during our ‘Object Days’. By constructing a mind map out of our associations, or a cartographic exercise of a day working together, we invite a heterotopic approach to history and memory. We shift away from any notion of a linear succession of events, and move to a spatial confrontation of the near and the far, the seen and the hidden, the side-by-side and the dispersed. We draw here on ideas of montage (Didi Huberman, Aby Warburg), constellation (Walter Benjamin) and psychosocial cartography. The mind maps aim to create interstitial zones of exploration and ultimately a deterritorialization of our object of knowledge. Knowledge obtained through montage creates a prolonged suspension of the moment of reaching conclusions. 

The mind maps contain fragments and associations from our written pieces produced during object days. The mind maps have been designed by Hugo Coria. 

Enter the mind maps here:

The Couch