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

At the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, on 22 October 2025, the exhibition Tenter l’art pour soigner highlights a donation made up of archives, painted ceramics and numerous gouache panels created in the late 1960s by patients of the Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital in Algeria. Here, the makers of these images are placed at the center: residents for whom drawing became a means of expression, a space to speak, represent and come together within the institution, alongside the care teams who ran these workshops.

At the heart of the context is the figure of Frantz Fanon, chief physician from 1953 to 1956, who broke with colonial psychiatry and established a social practice of care attentive to patients’ cultures and life trajectories. Handicraft workshops, music therapy, sport: these were frameworks for rebuilding social bonds and opening up channels of expression.

In the late 1960s, his successors carried this approach forward. Drawing workshops proliferated and produced a body of gouaches in which motifs, gestures and fragments of memory surface. The exhibition presents these works as close as possible to their creators and, thanks to the archives donated, situates their production within the political and institutional context of the time, in order to grasp what these artistic practices brought to Blida-Joinville.