Late Summer School 2026: Asylum & Alienation

Asylum has long carried a double meaning: to take refuge and to offer cure for that which ails us. Alienation, too, carries a double meaning: psychic isolation and material disidentification.

But asylums themselves—like any institution—also contribute to alienation and its cure. This was first observed by the Catalan psychoanalyst Francesc Tosquelles in the 1930s. Famous for his work in the south of France at Saint-Alban hospital, Tosquelles thought institutions could be “cured” and provide the spaces necessary to unlearn certain forms of social and political conditioning—what he called “disalienation.” Scaled up, these spaces could even cure society. After the fact, this practice was termed “institutional psychotherapy.”

For the 2026 Late Summer School at Rockbund Art Museum, Parapraxis have been invited to organize and lead a group experiment to do just this: participants will work, study, and share in the running of a temporary collective. Participants will also be guided through sites that are central to the history and culture of mental health practice in Shanghai, including a visit to the historic Shanghai Mercy Hospital; China’s first art gallery inside a mental health institution (No. 600); and the residences of May Fourth-era writers whose literary works engaged with psychoanalytic concepts.

This edition of Late Summer School will be delivered through two interconnected streams. Each day is structured by a large group meeting and two smaller task groups that participants will rotate through across the week. Field trips, poetry readings, screenings, lectures, and talks will focus on historical and methodological engagements with individuals and collectives experimenting in artistic, militant, and research milieus.

Faculty: Francisco J. González, Wendy Lotterman, Perwana Nazif, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Amy R. Wong, Hannah Zeavin, and Dora Zhang.

RAM × Parapraxis Late Summer School 2026: Asylum & Alienation is curated by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, Head of Programs, with support from Tintin Zhao, Assistant Curator, Programs, and Zelda Wu, Programs Assistant.

Curriculum
Large group meeting
In the large group meeting, participants will be invited into a two-way translated process group experience. The purpose of this gathering is to study the dynamics of group life as it unfolds in the present: as a living process unique to this particular group of people on each particular morning. It is not psychotherapy. Two facilitators, Francisco J. González and Amy R. Wong, will make interventions that help participants become more aware of their dynamics.

Small task groups
Smaller groups will be focused on translating a text collectively; aesthetic practice and non-verbal communication; and the making of a newspaper edition.

Aesthetic
The aesthetic practice task group led by Perwana Nazif and Geoffrey G. O’Brien will offer a non-verbal approach towards therapeutic vectors departing from Institutional Psychotherapy’s ergotherapy workshops. How can we enable reconstruction within the breakdown of language? What are the expressive possibilities of invention and improvisation in collective life? Participants will construct various knots and attempt to draw them, and also construct a mobius strip to experiment with space.

Newspaper 
The newspaper is a technology that has been deployed within asylums for at least the last one hundred years. Tosquelles made one at Saint-Alban with his patients, as did Frantz Fanon at Blida, and Jean Oury and Félix Guattari at La Borde. Led by Wendy Lotterman, Hannah Zeavin, and Dora Zhang this task group will create a newspaper that contains reflections from the participants’ lives, their poetry and artworks, mutual interviews, and/or reflections from the summer school.  

Timetable
Monday, August 24, 2026, 11am–6pm
Including lectures on “Silence as Tactic” from Geoffrey G. O’Brien and Dora Zhang, and film screenings by Perwana Nazif.

Tuesday, August 25, 2026, 11am–6pm
Including field trips led by Hannah Zeavin and Amy R. Wong.

Wednesday, August 26, 2026, 11am–6pm
Including a lecture on language and non-language from Wendy Lotterman and Perwana Nazif, and a poetry reading from Lottermann and Geoffrey G. O’Brien.

Thursday, August 27, 2026, 10am–5:30pm
Including field trips led by Amy R. Wong and Dora Zhang.

Thursday, August 27, 2026, 6pm–7pm
A public lecture from Amy R. Wong—with simultaneous translation into Chinese—that draws on Freud’s concept of "quiescence" to explore the psychic state of uncertainty between life and death induced by different historical shifts during China’s “entrance” into modernity. This lecture will be followed by a conversation between Wong, Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, and X Zhu-Nowell.

Friday, August 28, 2026, 11am–5:30pm
Including a talk on the work and history of community mental health with Francisco J. González and Hannah Zeavin.

Call for applications
We invite applicants from all backgrounds. From artists, writers, and scholars to people who work with children and those living with mental health conditions, or are interested in alternate artistic and literary lineages, this edition of the Late Summer School seeks to create a balance of participants from as many disciplines as possible. As the program is delivered primarily in English, applicants should have a good comprehension of the language. We encourage people who are blind, low vision, hard of hearing, and/or disabled to apply. Should you have any accessibility requirements, please inform us in your application.

To apply, please submit—in English—a CV of no longer than two pages and a short letter of motivation (maximum 300 words) as one combined PDF to eugeneyiunam.cheung@rockbundartmuseum.org with the subject line “Application: Late Summer School 2026” by Monday July 27, 2026 at 6pm (GMT+8). This program is limited to thirty participants. Successful applicants will be notified by August 3, 2026. Please note that the tuition fee for the five-day program is ¥420.

About Late Summer School
The Late Summer School at Rockbund Art Museum was initiated in 2024 by X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator, whereby a series of gatherings that examined artistic research, popular music, cinema, and literature came together to form a curriculum of collective study. Each edition of the school is entrusted to a guest—spanning scholars, artists, or a collective—who are invited to design a curriculum that proposes any combination of forming alternate histories, political solidarities, and speculative modes of knowledge production.