Login
       
  • Progress Report from the Strategic Sanctuary for the Destruction of Free Will

Kollectiv, Pil, 2016, Show, Exhibition or Event, Progress Report from the Strategic Sanctuary for the Destruction of Free Will

Abstract or Description:

Progress Report from the Strategic Sanctuary for the Destruction of Free Will presents a new work combining film, music and installation that juxtaposes the setting of the institution with the aesthetics of psychedelia.This project is an installation, film and sound work that takes over the gallery. Using plain white card, it distorts the structure of the gallery’s architecture, producing a paranoid shrunken space. Inside this space, performers in cardboard costumes re-enact abstracted, broken gestures drawn from video documentation of acid trips, psychedelic dancing, rehab sessions and radical psychotherapy workshops.
The project has been formed through Pil and Galia Kollectiv’s research into the anti-psychiatry movement, their interests in counter cultural movements and their studies around biopolitics and the proliferation of societal medication. In 1958, having had a life changing experience with LSD, former alcoholic Charles Dederich founded Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program based on residential care and an aggressive form of group therapy called ‘The Game’. The organisation gradually evolved into a controversial alternative community, described in a critical pamphlet as creating Strategic Sanctuaries for the Destruction of Free Will, "a subversive program for mixing delinquents and lefties". In 1984, anti-psychiatrist R. D. Laing described tranquilizers as chemical straight jackets. With our growing understanding of the plasticity of the brain and the potential to shape it, the tension between liberation and control in the struggle over the mind continues to define our relationship to labour, culture and production. Interrogating these ideas, the exhibition poses the question of whether a collective body can overcome the solipsism of the incommunicable experience of the individual mind.

Contributors:
ContributionName
CollaboratorKollectiv, Galia
Events:
TitleLocationDatesType
Progress report from the strategic sanctuary for the destruction of free willPump House Gallery, London, UK24 Feb - 3 Apr 2016One person show
Official URL: http://pumphousegallery.org.uk/programme/progress-...
Subjects: Creative Arts and Design > W100 Fine Art > W190 Fine Art not elsewhere classified
School or Centre: School of Arts & Humanities
Date Deposited: 06 Dec 2016 12:17
Last Modified: 28 Nov 2019 15:26
URI: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/2270
Edit Item (login required) Edit Item (login required)