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

In 2021, the Arab World Institute Museum received a generous donation: a collection of archives, painted ceramics, and numerous gouache drawings created in the late 1960s during social-therapy workshops conducted at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital (HPB), an Algerian institution marked by the iconic figure of Frantz Fanon. Here is this donation highlighted within its historical context.

Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital (HPB) was founded in 1933. Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), a psychiatrist and prominent anti-colonial figure, served there as chief physician from 1953 to 1956; the hospital would bear his name upon the country’s independence. Breaking with colonial psychiatry, Fanon renewed the psychiatric approach by adapting to the local cultural and social context of the inpatients. He created, with them and the medical team, a social fabric within the institution, including among other things manual activities, music therapy, and sports, to foster the patients’ expression with a view to possible healing and reintegration into society.

In the late 1960s, Fanon’s successors developed this practice of social therapy. Evidence of this are the drawing workshops that gave rise to this rich collection of gouache paintings. Drawing became a genuine medium of expression for the patients. The exhibition questions the content of these paintings by highlighting the human dimension of the inpatients who produced them; and, drawing on the donation’s archives, sheds light on the historical context in which the contributions of the hospital’s artistic workshops are situated.