CAC Brétigny

Preparing and feeding into the exhibition, the workshop of Political Therapy was created by Liz Magic Laser in collaboration with Adèle Jacques specifically for the period between the first and second round of France’s presidential elections.

The participants, guided by Adèle Jacques, who coached the actors of the video Primal Speech, are invited to bring to light the links between their political opinions and their personal experiences through a series of activities. These come from a range of therapeutic and meditational methods, notably from primal scream therapy, which include abreaction. By liberating the affect bound up with the memories of a traumatism that has been repressed until now, the process is designed to help the participants avert its pathogenic effects.

The workshop is meant to offer some of the experimental therapeutic techniques at work in the artist’s videos. Similar workshops have taken place in New York right before the presidential election last year at Brooklyn Academy of Music and in the U.K. right before article 50 was initiated at Grand Union in Birmingham. Next month workshops will also happen at Jupiter Artland Foundation in Scotland where participants will deal with debates surrounding Scottish independence.

Two sessions, two options:
11 am-1 pm, followed by a lunch
3 pm-5 pm, followed by a snack

Adèle Jacques is a French actor, musician, writer, translator and dialect coach. She has lived and worked in Paris, London, New-York and Los Angeles where she currently resides. In addition to her work on screen she has participated in a number of cross-cultural multimedia projects, often translating and acting in the pieces. Jacques' collaborations include a performance co-created with artist Noritoshi Hirakawa for PS1 MoMA, New York, and the Foundation Cartier, Paris, a photo essay with New-York photographer Willy Somma and a video called “Adèle” co-directed by artists Sanya Kantarovsky and Leigh Ledare in which she plays a disturbed version of herself. For the past few years, she’s extensively researched the myth of water and women, which brought her to collaborate and lead therapeutic group experiments such as “Dolas” in Los Angeles, a circle of women that's focused on enabling creative process.