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Madness is the language of the excluded: an interview with Javier Tellez.

Article Excerpt
THE INTERVIEW FORMAT IS MOST FITTING FOR A Discussion of Javier Tellez's recent work, given that he is so articulate about the complicated set of references--historical, literary, cultural, personal--that inform his practice. Tellez is earnest in his attempts to ethically engage with communities of individuals who live outside the parameters of a "sane" society.

Tellez's interest in articulating a position of alterity is partly autobiographical: both his parents were psychiatrists in the provincial city of Valencia, Venezuela. His father, a Spanish immigrant, was a pioneer in his field and the first in the country to introduce certain psychotropic treatments. Perhaps this exposure from an early age to those deemed mentally ill has allowed him to recognize alterity as a permanent cultural condition, one that is inscribed within identity based on the distinction between self and other.

The collaborative nature of his work means that the final product is collectively determined and does not necessarily ascribe to conventional aesthetic concerns. In this conversation, Tellez describes his work as documentations of fictional scenarios created within the psychiatric institution from the point of view of those who inhabit it. What results are works that have no claim to authority and no centred point of view, creating an experience of vulnerability and ambivalence for the viewer. It is work that demands the viewer's active participation.

Michele Faguet and Cristobal Lehyt: When speaking about your work you have often made reference to the phonetic similarity between museum and mausoleum written about by Adorno. Your own proximity to and interest in psychiatric practice has resulted in a series of works that extracts, in an almost archaeological manner, objects from the sterile, white hospital wards that make up the visual landscape of the mentally ill and inserts these objects into the pristine white cube of the museum. Can you elaborate on what you see to be the processes of selection and exclusion common to both psychiatric and curatorial practices?

JT: The museum and the psychiatric hospital are products of the enlightenment project. It is not a coincidence that la convention of the First Republic opened the Louvre to the public in 1793 at the same time that Philippe Pinel was named chief physician of La Bicetre. It is as if the same impulse that created the museum liberated the patients from their chains, marking both the birth of the modern asylum and the public museum.

Growing up as the son of two psychiatrists, I often visited the psychiatric hospital where my father worked. At that time I also began to go to museums, and I remember that even back then I already found a lot of similarities: hygienic spaces, long corridors, enforced silence and the weight of the architecture. Both institutions are symbolic representations of authority, founded on taxonomies based on the normal...

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