Home Outside and Inside – Artistic Self-Positionings of Psychiatric Patients around 1900
This subproject uses artworks created by institutionalized patients around 1900 to explore how they emotionally situate themselves both inside and outside the asylum.
Project description
Subproject C06, “Home Outside and Inside – Artistic Self-Positionings of Psychiatric Patients around 1900,” develops a new perspective on the lived experiences of asylum patients around 1900 while also offering insights into the majority society of the time. For the first time, it brings together the history of psychiatry and art history to examine notions of home(s) in institutional everyday life, in patients’ experiences, and in their artistic works—an existential dimension of these individuals’ realities. The broader framework is the psychiatric care system, whose practices are likewise analysed with regard to concepts of home. In artistic terms, lost homes are recalled in sometimes fragmentary depictions; the institution itself can be seen and appropriated as a form of home. In some cases, entirely new, fantastical homelands are created. Taken together, these perspectives reflect the particular exclusion experienced by these individuals and allow institutional psychiatry to be reconsidered from a subjective, emotional point of view.
