PROGRAM
10.12.2025
WEDNESDAY
11AM

INTRODUCTION
Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director, MASP
Kaira Cabañas, Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Publications, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, NGA, Washington, DC

11:10AM–1PM
ROUNDTABLE

ELIELTON RIBEIRO
Aurora Cursino dos Santos: When the Night Falls
Aurora Cursino dos Santos (1896–1959) is an artist who was a patient at the Juquery Psychiatric Hospital, where she produced several paintings. She developed a consistent set of works featuring night landscapes. There is evidence of heris life path, reports of prostitution, and the treatment she underwent in the psychiatric hospital. Her writing was stylistically integrated into her pictorial productions and appears with images of denunciation, violence, desires, memories, and delusions. Front and back intertwine in many works, since she painted on both sides of the same support. When there is a backside, it highlights the materials she reused to reinvent life.


INGRID VON BEYME
Else Blankenhorn: Fantastic Imperial Currency
In the Bellevue private sanatorium, Else Blankenhorn (1873–1920) chose Emperor Wilhelm II as her “spiritual husband.” On his behalf, she created banknotes in fantastic sums to finance the excavation and resurrection of deceased lovers. In addition, her oeuvre contains symbolic representations and motives from nature, architecture, and religion, the meaning of which is difficult to decipher. Blankenhorn is the only woman to whom Hans Prinzhorn originally intended to dedicate a separate chapter in his seminal book Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922). He had to cut back due to space issues and instead planned a monograph, which he never accomplished.


BART MARIUS
Baroness Lucy Szaak: Art as Memory
Lucy Szaak was a patient in a women’s asylum located on the outskirts of the Belgian city of Ghent. When she met Dirk Pauwels (creative therapist), she started working from her memories as an aristocrat. In the world of Szaak, big parties with the Beatles as special guests were held in her hometown in Hungary. Her colorful world functions as a window into her fantasies and desires. Szaak’s works were first presented to the public in the 1970s as part of an exhibition in a small gallery near Ghent. This exhibition was the first time work by a female artist from that studio of creative expression was shown, constituting a lesser-known precedent for presenting patients from an asylum as artists. Since 2022, these works have been part of a larger collection at the Museum Dr. Guislain.

Mediated by: Isabella Rjeille, MASP


1PM–2:30PM
BREAK

2:30–3:30PM
ROUNDTABLE


GLAUCIA VILLAS BÔAS
An Unusual Event: The Concretists from Ateliê do Engenho de Dentro
By suspending familiar elements, art and madness surprise us. Neither of them can be reduced to categories or concepts. For this reason, reflecting on the meanings of the relationship between them is a sensitive task. In this presentation, I explore the connections between the emergence of concrete abstract art in Rio de Janeiro and the Ateliê [Studio] do Engenho de Dentro at the Pedro II Psychiatric Hospital. I seek to recognize an unusual event that took place from 1946 to 1951, highlighting the bonds established among schizophrenic patients at the hospital, young artists at the start of their careers, the work of Dr. Nise da Silveira (1905–1999), and the interventions of art critic Mário Pedrosa (1900–1981). Lastly, I show the role of this unique sociability in the emergence of Concretism in Rio de Janeiro.


RAPHAEL KOENIG
“A Place Without Reason”: Surrealist Poet Paul Éluard at the Saint-Alban Hospital
Madness, as a theme and an aesthetic trope, is ubiquitous in the productions of the French Surrealist movement. Actual interactions of its members with patients in psychiatric institutions, however, are relatively rare. This talk will discuss French poet Paul Éluard’s stay at the Saint-Alban Hospital in Occupied France (November 1943 to February 1944) as a significant turning point in Surrealist discourses on madness and mental health. Éluard shared the daily life of patients, took part in discussions on psychiatric care with medical staff, and disseminated clandestine anti-Nazi poetry and other related literary works from the hospital.

Mediated by: Yudi Rafael, MASP


3:30–4:30PM
LECTURE

JAVIER TÉLLEZ
The Ship of Fools
A boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as Heidegger wrote, the boundary is that which something begins its “presencing”. Reviewing the relation between physical borders and the historical construction of madness in Western culture, I will comment on some recent - and not so recent - works where I explored a particular “presencing” that can occur in liminal spaces produced by constructed notions of mental illness. Using the image of the stultifera navis (the Ship of Fools), I will expand on several projects that attempt to navigate freely through an in-between space where hierarchies like sense and nonsense, center and margin, normality and pathology are no longer stable entities.

Mediated by: Kaira Cabañas, Associate Dean for Academic Programs and Publications, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, NGA, Washington, DC. 


11.12.2025
THURSDAY

11AM–1PM


IBÃ HUNI KUIN
Nixi Pae: Miração as a Path of Healing and Memory among the Huni Kuin
To talk about miração, the Huni Kuin people share Nixi Pae, their sacred beverage. It is under the influence of this drink that the miração experience begins. In the Huni Kuin language, mirar (“aiming”) is looking and understanding what may happen to oneself in the future. The miração teaches what it takes to comprehend life and feel joy. It’s a learning experience with the spirit, the strength of the forest that lives within you. The spirit speaks and teaches through music and visions. In that force, you change—you stop being just a person and become part of the spirit. It is an inner journey, where the body rests and the mind walks. The miração brings light, knowledge, and joy to the heart.


ADANA OMÁGUA KAMBEBA
Visions of the Forest: Madness, Delirium, and Healing from an Indigenous Perspective
The lecture presents, from an Indigenous perspective, a reflection on madness, delirium, and healing in dialogue with art and Western psychiatry. For the people of the forest, delirium does not always mean a break with reason, but a possible call from the spirit. A possible means of communication with the invisible realm and Mother Earth. Indigenous art conveyed through chants, paintings, and rituals functions as a symbolic translation of these visions, integrating body, spirit, and community in dialogical processes. Adana Omágua Kambeba proposes to decolonize the notion of health, recognizing that there may be different ways of perceiving the world, and revealing legitimate knowledge necessary for collective health. The lecturer will present inviting reflections that seek to inspire and bring to light new networks of care, in which listening, dreaming, and the feeling of belonging are paths to personal and planetary healing.

Mediated by: Guilherme Giufrida, MASP


1–2:30PM
BREAK

2:30–4:30PM
ROUNDTABLE


EURÍPEDES JUNIOR and CLAUDIA BOLSHAW
The Spider’s Web and the Bee’s House: Fernando Diniz, Demiurge
In the last years of his life, Fernando Diniz, an artist at the Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente [Museum of Images of the Unconscious], produced more than 80,000 drawings that were the basis for his award-winning film Estrêla de oito pontas (Eight-pronged Star, 1996; 12 minutes), produced with filmmaker Marcos Magalhães. For Diniz, the star is a graphic system that organizes space, and from which all its figures emerge. The film also presents the words of this Black artist who experienced racism and psychiatric hospitalization for 45 years. Whether figurative or abstract, in paintings, drawings, modeling, or film, he constantly explores the aspects of shapes and colors, lines and volumes in a continuous stream, as if depicting the activities of the Universe.


ALASSANE SECK and ABDOULAYE ARMIN KANE
From Words to Expression
This presentation will focus on treatment at the Atelier d’Expression Artistique of the Clinique Psychiatrique Moussa Diop at the FANN Hospital in Dakar, Senegal. The Atelier’s approach is fully inspired by the therapeutic method of the glorious School of Psychiatry in Dakar. In fact, one of the main achievements of this historic African school—preserved to this day—is the famous PENC. This was a place of dialogue for the ancient Senegalese and African peoples, which our famous psychiatrists of the 1950s turned into a therapeutic space. Above all, the Atelier inspires an atmosphere of sharing, a climate of freedom—controlled, of course—and an escape from social isolation. In the film Atelier d’expression (2016), Friedl Kubelka vom Gröller captured several artists in the Atelier, a space that provides many patients a place in which they can practice talking, as well as sketch and carry out artistic projects.

Mediated by: Bruna Fernanda, MASP