Unwalling the Psyche

Artist Kader Attia and curator Wietske Maas will discuss fragments from Attia’s film installations Reason’s Oxymorons (2015) and The Body’s Legacies, Pt. 2: The Postcolonial Body (2018). They will also reflect on the collective experience of La Colonie, a decolonial space for debate, education, and conviviality founded by Attia in Paris in 2016. Since the pandemic, La Colonie has continued as a nomadic project.

Attia’s work presents listening as both an aesthetic method and a socially reparative practice. This mode of listening, which circulates between the artist, the interlocutors, and the viewers, echoes Frantz Fanon’s practice of social therapy. Fanon believed that healing could be achieved through collective conversations and by transforming the everyday life of an institution — its rhythms, spaces, and social relations. At the same time, the discussion highlights the fractured and uneven reception of Fanon across different geographic and cultural contexts. The lives, bodies, and practices of repair of these differently situated subjects trouble the ostensible binaries between reason and unreason, politics and psychiatry, the rural and the urban, colonial pasts and decolonial struggles.

Together, the films and the accompanying conversation prompt the question: what forms and limits of knowledge about madness emerge when we listen to the collective voices of psychotherapists, psychiatrists, traditional healers, artists, storytellers, political activists, and witnesses brought together by Attia? How might this woven multiplicity of knowledges unsettle the colonial walls that continue to alienate psychic and social life?

Reason’s Oxymorons (2015)
18-channel video installation
Reason’s Oxymorons assembles a wide range of conversations on trauma, subjectivity, imagination, and repair. Across eighteen chapters—labelled Reason and Politics, The Magical Sciences, Modernity, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia, Ancestors and Neurosis, The Group, The Individual, and others — the interviewed actors draw on psychiatry, philosophy, ethnography, shamanic traditions, music, storytelling, and political experience.

The work stages a key tension in Fanon’s clinical writings: the coloniality of the psyche and the divergent cultural understandings of trauma and repair. While regimes of repair dominant in the West often aim to correct, erase, or conceal ‘damage’, many non-Western traditions treat the scar as an active site of meaning — a visible index of past violence and a reservoir for resistance, critique, and learning.

The Body’s Legacies, Pt. 2: The Postcolonial Body (2018)
Video, 42 min
This work examines the racialized body in contemporary France, drawing on the testimonies of cultural practitioners, journalists, and activists. It focuses on the 2017 police assault on Théo Luhaka, a young man of Congolese descent in a Paris banlieue. Through a combination of personal memories, sociological insights, and philosophical analysis, the film reveals the enduring links between colonial forms of domination and contemporary state violence.

The Postcolonial Body rejects the idea that the mere ‘inclusion’ of racialized subjects within European liberal democratic systems constitutes repair. Instead, it insists on confronting the racist psychic structures that persist beneath official narratives of progress, reason, and equality.