Tenter l’art pour soigner - À l’hôpital psychiatrique de Blida-Joinville dans les années 1960

In 2021, the Institut du Monde Arabe museum received a generous donation: a collection of archives, painted ceramics and numerous gouache drawings produced in the late 1960s during social therapy workshops held at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital (HPB), an Algerian institution marked by the emblematic figure of Frantz Fanon. This donation is presented here in its historical context.

The Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital (HPB) was founded in 1933. Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a doctor of psychiatry and a leading figure of anti-colonialism, served as chief physician there from 1953 to 1956; the hospital took his name upon the country’s independence. Breaking with colonial psychiatry, Fanon renewed the psychiatric approach by adapting it to the local cultural and social context of the patients. Together with them and the medical team he wove a social fabric within the institution, instituting, among other things, manual activities, music therapy and sports, in order to encourage patients’ expression with a view to possible recovery and reintegration into society.

In the late 1960s, Fanon’s successors developed this practice of social therapy. The drawing workshops that produced this exceptionally rich body of gouache paintings bear witness to that development. Drawing became a true means of expression for the patients. The exhibition interrogates the content of these paintings by emphasizing the human dimension of the patients who made them; and, drawing on the donation’s archives, highlights the historical context in which the contributions of the hospital’s artistic workshops are situated.