Queer Tosquelles: Anti-Fascism, Vagabonding Psychiatry, Non-Identitarian Lives

With Janna Graham, Carles Guerra, Isabell Lorey, Angela Melitopoulos, Stefan Nowotny, Anne Querrien, Gerald Raunig, Wanderley Santos, Francesco Salvini, Henning Schmidgen, Elena Vogman.

The international conference will focus on the practices of Catalan/French psychiatrist François Tosquelles (1912–94), who influenced Félix Guattari, Frantz Fanon and many others—from institutional analysis to political philosophy. Tosquelles is still largely unknown in Germany. For some years now, however, a lively reception has been taking place in the art field, especially in Spain and France, with large archival and research exhibitions, catalogues and films.

The conference at the KHM will bring together researchers and artists working on the genealogies of Tosquelles’s manifold surrounds and exploring the potentials of his practice today. Here, queerness emerges in many facets: through Tosquelles’s insistence on the deconstruction of the nuclear family and the importance of other forms of making kin, through the various rhythms of vagabonding, through the weird, the strange, the non-sensical and the non-normalized, through a political philosophy of multiplicity, through a queering practice that traverses all non-identitarian forms of life.

Organized by Isabell Lorey, Anna Bromley, Konstantin Butz, Lilian Haberer, Katrin M. Kämpf, Mary Mikaelyan, Maren Mildner, Stefan Nowotny, Heidi Pfohl. In cooperation with the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp).

Queer Studies KHM present international conference
June 21, 2024, 10:30am through June 22, 6pm at Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln / Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) Aula of the KHM, Filzengraben 2, 50676 Köln. Free entrance. In English—no online attendance or livestream available.