Transfiguring Pain Poetically. Exploring the Liberating Potential of Artistic Creation

Individuals experiencing psychopathological disturbances often recount having been exposed to an incomprehensible and ineffable ‘foreignness’ or ‘strangeness’ in the face of which ‘conventional’ discourses, such as the clinical or the critical, break down and fail to accommodate their need of expression.

The overall ambition of this seminar is to discuss whether and how artistic creation may offer a liberating potential as a way of responding to such disturbing experiences and thus to reach a new understanding of artistic creation as a possible resource for alleviation or relief. The project accedes to this ambition by developing an “ethico-aesthetic paradigm,” which emphasizes the inextricability of ethics and aesthetics in approaching artistic creations by individuals experiencing psychopathological disturbances without reducing their idiomatic singularity.

The advance of such paradigm aims at enabling a better understanding of the creative act as a gesture of freedom that reopens the possibility of a more resourceful way of existing and of making sense of this existence that may have become overwhelmed and fixated by its disturbing experiences.