On May 22nd 2025, the FREEPSY collective, in collaboration with sound artist Matthew Faulkner, release the multilingual sound project ‘Multi-Tonal Reading: Breaking Down the Walls of the Asylum’ via Bandcamp.
This sound art piece starts from voicing ‘multi-tonal readings’ of the book ‘My Farewell to the Yellow House’, written in 1927 by Hungarian psychiatrist and psychoanalysts István Hollós (2024, 1968 Press). Fragments of the book are read out by more than twenty voices, in seventeen languages. The voices are then composed in a sound art piece.
‘My Farewell to the Yellow House’ is a manifesto that rethinks psychiatric care. To follow István Hollós’s own words, it aims to break down the walls of the asylum. In this book, the ‘asylum’ is not strictly as an institution, a place, or a building, but a psychic state, one where the demarcations between the ‘sane’ and the ‘insane’ are strong and unquestionable. Hollós speaks of a fear of madness that encompasses the whole social fabric, leading to exclusion, splitting, and various forms of authoritarianism. This event-book turns on its head the question of who needs to be healed and who is doing the healing. As radical psychiatrists have argued, it is the psychiatric hospital, or the asylum, or even the doctor-patient relationship that needs to be cured. Tuning to the voice of the patients, Hollós writes: ‘We are the sick, but it is you healthy people who must be healed! Through us, the dreaming heroes, storytellers and lunatics, the axis of history creaks towards new, incredible cities and possibilities for life’ (‘What is a Lunatic’).
The project ‘Multi-tonal Reading: Breaking Down the Walls of the Asylum’ started with allowing ourselves to be affected by this unusual book, with it transforming our thinking and artistic practice, and with dreaming that it can reach far and wide, across spaces and languages. The FREEPSY collective and their collaborators translated and sounded-out sections of the book. The translations to different languages are also translations between different worlds, opening a space for reflection on bearing witness, public testimony and the capacity of societal hosting of strangeness and madness. The readings are a ‘counter-point’ or ‘counter-song’, embodying the paradox of a multi-tonal music without a community.
Would you like to enter this book with us? It feels lonely in there, since, as Hollós himself says, most visitors stop at the gate of the asylum. Would you like to pass this book through you, or to let yourself pass through it, re-folding its pages and re-folding yourself as you listen?
The FREEPSY Collective:
Ana Čvorović, Ana Minozzo, Ana Tomcic, Ewan O’Neill, Ivan Ward, Julianna Pusztai, Lizaveta van Munsteren, Raluca Soreanu
Sound artist:
Matthew Faulkner
Collaborators:
Adrian Courage, Ana Gebrim, Anderson Santos, Aylin Darwin, Carolina Besoain, Daniela Larraín, Elena Kostyleva, Ethan Simm, Geralyn Mulqueen, Irina Culic, Luca Leoncini, Marie Kolkenbrock, Marita Vyrgioti, Maryam Baniasadi, May Ziadé, Noreen Giffney, Rana Khalaf, Róisín Ní Ghairbhí, Shane Waltener, Son Nguyen, Wenzhuo Song
Listen to the sound project via Bandcamp here.
