“Francesc Tosquelles: Exile, 'Madness', and Political-Psychic Praxis” is a two-day event that concerns the work of Catalan revolutionary and psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles in conversation with Joana Masó, Camille Robcis, and Mireia Sallarès. 

Joana Masó and Camille Robcis will each discuss their work related to Frances Tosquelles. This will be followed by a roundtable discussion with Masó, Robcis, and Professor of French and American Studies and Ethnicity and Comparative Literature Lydie Moudileno.

For information on the film screening, see here.  

Biographies 

Joana Masó is a literary critic whose work focuses on the crossover between literature, thinking, and contemporary art. She is a senior lecturer at Barcelona University, a researcher at ADHUC–Research Centre for Theory, Gender and Sexuality, and the UNESCO chair, Women, Development and Cultures. Since 2017, she has coordinated the research project “The forgotten legacy of François Tosquelles”, which has resulted in the publication of the volume Tosquelles. Curing the Institutions, recognized with the City of Barcelona Essay, Humanities and History Prize 2021. She has also co-curated the international exhibition Tosquelles. Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field. 

Mireia Sallarès (Barcelona, 1973) is a visual artist graduated in Fine Arts at University of Barcelona and with film studies at New School University in New York. She is guest lecturer at ISDAT Institut Supérieur des Arts de Toulouse, France. Her methodology generates trans-disciplinary artistic projects from situated feminisms concerned by nonfiction and political dimension that are formalized with films, books, installations and site specific interventions. 

She has received important grants and awards as the Leonardo Grant for Researchers of BBVA Foundation or the Barcelona 2019 City Award of visual arts. Las Muertes Chiquitas, a long research on female orgasm as a political problem carried out in Mexico is the project with which she has obtained the greatest international recognition. Her film, Potential history of Francesc Tosquelles, Catalonia and fear, has been awarded in the Video Creation Award of the LOOP Barcelona festival. 

Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University.  She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history.  She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell, 2013) and of Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago, 2021).  She is currently working on a new project tentatively titled The War on Gender.  She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, LAPA (Princeton Law and Public Affairs), the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. 

This event is co-sponsored by the USC Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Doctoral Program, the USC Del Amo Foundation, the Francophone Resource and Research Center, USC Department of Comparative Literature, the USC Department of French and Italian, USC Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, and with the participation of the MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the California Institute of the Arts.

For more information, email pnazif@usc.edu