Lydia Fotopoulou in the play based on Camille Claudel's letters
The curator of the Prinzhorn collection Thomas Röske commented on the impact of such collections on modernism and contemporary pictorial expression, as well as on artists "marginalized” by disease that are already included in it. The symposium ended with the theatre show "The wave of madness in the interwar period," Stelios Krasanakis’ dramatization of the “diary of isolation” of the sculptor Camille Claudel who was stage impersonated by the actress Lydia Fotopoulou.
Stelios Krasanakis, psychiatrist and drama therapist for GRReporter
QUESTION: The names of famous artists - Van Gogh, Antonin Artaud, Salvador Dali - are associated with extreme mental conditions, sealed in their art. The staging you directed and its premiere which wrapped up the symposium is devoted to creativity and insanity and is theatrically based on Camille Claudel’s letters written while she was in a mental institution where she spent 30 years of her life until her death. Besides deeply moving the viewers, it makes them think over the artwork this eminent sculptor could have created if modern concepts of art created by people with mental disorders dominated in the interwar period. A narrator mentions at the end of the show that in 1968 a memorial plaque was placed on Claudel’s grave on which, beside hers, are written several German female names. In memory of who else is this plaque?
Stelios Krasanakis: There are many artists whose work is related or is the result of psychopathological conditions and reflects the emphatic force of madness and insanity. We should note that there are cases of creative psychotic disorders and other, catastrophic ones which destroy the creative ability. Camille Claudel belongs to the second category. The last known sculpture she has left dates back to 1905 and is a bust of her brother - the poet and diplomat Paul Claudel. We have no works by her ever since then and she spent the years from 1913 to 1943 in a mental institution where she had not scatched even a single drawing. As for the memorial plaque with the names, this is a creative invention especially for the show. It aims to highlight the biography parallel between Claudel and female artists whose works are shown in the Prinzhorn collection. In fact, such a plaque has never existed and this will be more clearly emphasized in the final version of the theatre event which will soon be performed on Athenian stage in March.
QUESTION: Apart from its diagnostic and therapeutic value the art of people with mental disorders helps to better understand the structure and nature of madness, how do such people percept society and the world at large, it facilitates the mapping of the subconscious. Could you make it clearer in what manner "could art be a way out of the impasse of the soul" as you say in another interview of yours?
Stelios Krasanakis: Mental disease means a mental impasse. Anything that helps expression and exteriorizing of mentality is an antidote to mental inactivity. The flexibility of our mentality, the ability to adapt to difficult internal and external situations, are signs of mental health. Creative expression serves in this direction but it does not necessarily mean that any expression of our creative capabilities is a work of art. When this happens, as with the mentally ill artists gathered in the Prinzhorn collection, it is an evidence not only for the talent but also for the mental power of the man who can distinguish light even in darkness, and life beyond the prospect of death.
Marios Vazeos, financier and director of the festival on the island of Naxos to GRReporter
QUESTION: The thematics of the summer festival on the island of Naxos in 2008 was the harbinger of the exhibit "Cause of death: euthanasia" at the Benaki Museum exploring the relationship between art and madness. The cultural organization ΑΙΩΝ in collaboration with the scientific society Psychology-Art’ organized within the festival then the unique exhibition titled Psychotopia, helping the audience to understand this interdependence through literary and theatrical texts, musical and film works, oeuvres of fine art. Obviously you, the organizers, have special sensitivity and sense of the human soul’s topography whether it comes to people with mental disorders or healthy ones and you acknowledge their art to be equivalent to that of "normal" people. Would you tell what was your concept for organizing these events?
Marios Vazeos: The exhibition ‘Psychotopia’ was only a part of an arts festival which presented the relationship between artistic creativity and madness and insanity whatever its source might be - even madness of love. Mental landscapes verge on the landscape of art and there is always osmosis, intertwining between artistic expression and deviations and curvings of the human soul.
QUESTION: Along with the symposium on Art and Madness that followed the opening of the exhibition of the Prinzhorn collection we saw the installation ‘The Book of Death Talks’ by the contemporary German painter and sculptor Klaus Pfeiffer, who lives and works on Naxos. What were his ‘works of madness’ shown during the festival on the island in 2008?
Marios Vazeos: We have long lasting collaboration with Klaus Pfeiffer. He is an artist we admire and value. He took part in the exhibition with the installation ‘The Ship of the Insane’ associated with the repulsive custom in the Middle Ages and in later times - before the creation of asylums for the mentally ill - people with mental disturbances to be boarded on a ship which was let sail unnavigated till the waves devoured it.