“I wanted performance to be in my blood,” warns Alegría Gobeil about Protocols. With his exhibition, the artist opens a Pandora’s box, that of mental health, and adds his two cents: “My real interest in treating this subject is that there is a serious lack of politicization of these questions. » That’s it.
Alegría Gobeil thus, to a lesser extent, attempted to reproduce on her person an insulin shock, also called insulin therapy, or Sakel cure, which is “a hypoglycemic coma caused, for therapeutic purposes, by an injection of insulin”, according to the Office québécois de la langue française. As a reminder, this controversial practice because of the risks it poses to patients was in fact used in the mid-20th century.e century in psychiatry to treat certain illnesses, perhaps even until the 1970s in certain Quebec hospitals. But, for now, the artist’s request for access to the archives of the Pierre-Janet mental health hospital, in Outaouais — prologue to Protocols —, remained a dead letter.
“I thought I would reach an ultra-severe state of hypoglycemia, but I couldn’t. It’s really dangerous and the experience was tedious, unpleasant and disorienting,” explains Alegría Gobeil, who reports the violence of the process through, among other things, a sequence of a dozen impressions of self-portraits taken on le vive, stuck on the walls of the L’Imagier exhibition room in Gatineau. His goal? From the opacity of information from the past, access today to a less vague zone.
Fake accident
« Protocols is a superposition of elements which challenge history and fiction simultaneously and which allowed me a new interpretation, more open than the simple documentary report. » Precisely, Alegría Gobeil drew on the feature film I, you, he, she (1974) by Chantal Akerman, in which the filmmaker, also the main character, feeds on sugar, both for the aesthetics of her black and white photographs and for the way she ingests the substance. “The passage where Chantal Akerman lets the bag of sugar escape in an extremely unconvincing way, I felt like a false accident. It became an obsession,” says the artist.
The fact of staging the documentation of his performance of insulin shock therefore appears to him as an effort to create a reality which does not exist. “I immediately felt very strongly in this passage that the film fails to be fiction. I felt like I was watching a performance video,” explains Alegría Gobeil. In mirror, Protocols manifests itself more as a performance exhibition, where microdiversions are hidden here and there, where the emotional charge is never resolved. The artist also mentions his request to the curator, Philippe Bourdeau, to “make a work disappear with bleach as the exhibition progresses over time”.
The interest of Protocols would therefore reside in the generation of an object of projection and fabrication for visitors. “As we do not guide the reception of the elements, a feeling of strangeness or discomfort can set in. » Moreover, nothing can be extracted from the hermetic piece of L’Imagier since the work is only one. “The exhibition room becomes the receptacle of past and future actions, like a kind of fixed point in space-time,” indicates the artist.
Perpetual suffering
“I don’t want to reduce her to that and say that Chantal Akerman is crazy, but she is a person who suffered. This is a person who took his own life,” underlines Alegría Gobeil, who also sees in I, you, he, she the embodiment of depression. Suffering as a driving force for work and creation particularly interests him, and the artist has long revolved his practice around themes linked to psychiatrization.
Finally, Alegría Gobeil observes in the use of insulin shock the beginnings of the contemporary fascination with the administration of substances in order to alter the state of patients. “The paradigm in which we live at the moment is psychopharmacology,” says the artist, equally ruthless with regard to the brutality and unscrupulousness of modern psychiatry. ” With ProtocolsI want to create bridges between the stories of insulin therapy and our current processes, to try to encourage, even if minimally, even if anecdotally, that we develop together discourses, then critical practices of psychiatry in this that it is carceral, violent, normative, isolating, individualizing. » The door opens ajar.
To watch on video
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