LIAS Film Series: "Potential History of Francesc Tosquelles, Catalonia and Fear"

Date: Wednesday, May 7th 2025, 7 pm
Location: SCALA Arthouse Cinema | Apothekenstr. 17 | 21335 Lüneburg

With an Introduction by von Nancy Luxon. Free admission. 

In her semi-documentary film, Mireia Sallarès explores the suppressed history of an extraordinary psychiatrist: Francesc Tosquelles, Catalan exile, revolutionary and pioneer of radical humanist psychiatry, fled the Spanish Civil War during the Nazi occupation in the 1940s and transformed a provincial hospital in the seclusion of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole into a lively, creative experiment: an ‘asylum village’ based on equality, community and self-management.

Sallarès takes up Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's concept of potential history - there is a past that is not taken into account in official historiography. A critical reading of archives is therefore necessary in order to tell the undocumented stories. In this sense, she reconstructs Tosquelles' work as a contribution to the history of psychiatry and as a repressed chapter of Catalan revolutionary history, European artistic development and the anti-colonial tradition of thought. His methods not only influenced Frantz Fanon and Félix Guattari, but also the emergence of Art Brut, the art of the ‘outsider’, as it was later celebrated by Jean Dubuffet.

The film deliberately dispenses with illustrative images - words, narratives, performative moments and archive material take centre stage. The result is a dense, demanding and at the same time fascinating essay film that shows how radically empathetic care, political determination and creative freedom can work together. Tosquelles does not stand here as a historical relic, but as a source of inspiration for a different way of thinking - in psychiatry, in art, in dealing with history.

2021 | Mireia Sallarès | USA