Francesc Tosquelles, Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field

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Image courtesy of CCCB.

Francesc Tosquelles (Reus, 1912-Granges d’Òlt, 1994) was a Republican psychiatrist, exiled in France, who conducted avant-garde therapeutic, political and cultural experiments. He dignified the lives of those who did not count, abandoned in mental hospitals and asylums, while denouncing the pathologies of the normal man in the Europe of fascism. He humanized the life of psychiatric hospitals in times of major political transformations, but also in times of crisis.

Tosquelles was one of the pioneers who introduced psychoanalysis in Catalunya and Spain during the opening up of the Republic’s public healthcare policies. During the Spanish Civil War, he became involved as head of psychiatry of the Republican army on the Aragon Front and in Extremadura, with the first therapeutic community experiences avant la lettre, which would be developed in England years later. Once in France, he made possible the formation of a psychiatric unit within the internment camp for Republican exiles at Sètfonts in order to treat the complaints of Spanish exiles and enable some escapes. Also in France, he fought daily against the so-called extermination douce, at a time when, during the Nazi occupation of France, some 40,000 patients in psychiatric hospitals were allowed to die of hunger.

Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field

In the 1970s, Tosquelles recounted the experience begun in Catalunya with a phrase by Lautréamont, from Les Chants de Maldoror, that the surrealists made famous by talking about new forms of creation and of random beauty: “Beautiful, like the chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table.” But when Tosquelles evoked the Catalan psychiatric avant-garde, he diverted and displaced the meaning of this phrase to give it a new materiality. According to him, what had been done in Catalonia between the years 1910 and 1930 was akin to “putting a sewing machine in a wheat field.”

This exhibition presents a series of materials of a documentary nature, some that are being seen for the first time that narrate the geography through which Francesc Tosquelles traveled from the 1930s onward. In dialogue with this documentary material, a series of pieces are presented that are linked to authors of the surrealist avant-garde as well as objects produced by the patients of the Hospital of Saint-Alban. The historical route presented by the exhibition around these cultural productions is dotted with contemporary works and projects.

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