Protocoles – Alegría Gobeil

Protocoles highlights the mechanisms of control that govern access to the history of psychiatry as experienced by those who have been its subjects, and the imprint of these histories on bodies that remain psychiatricized to this day. By playing with the implicit rules of the exhibition space, Gobeil inserts their own signs, resonating with institutional signage while subverting them through concealed displacements.

At the entrance of the gallery, a letter addressed to psychiatric hospitals in Outaouais requests information about insulin shock treatment, suspected to have been used until the early 1970s. This missive questions the circulation of information related to psychiatric history—existing in the tension between those who are its experts and those who experience it. Inside the gallery, Gobeil creates a space where each element is part of a protocol. Subtly integrated, each component embodies a trace of a past action—suggesting that it has always belonged to the memory of the space.

The protocol in question aims to repeat a gesture from Chantal Akerman’s Je, tu, il, elle (1974). Constrained by the space, hiding and revealing itself, the movement originates from a scene in which a bag of sugar is spilled by the film’s protagonist, in a deceptively accidental manner. Prior to this action, Gobeil, who is hypoglycemic, has fasted. They then gradually ingest spoonfuls of the spilled sugar as the protocol unfolds. The action temporarily alters the artist’s body, unfolding within their blood.

As a result, a series of large-format images are adhered directly to the wall, providing a fixed viewpoint on the gesture made by Gobeil. Two plaques of tinted glass are embedded in the wall above a bench—behind them are the two glucose tests marking the beginning and end of the action. The bench allows us to observe the gesture in a way that replicates the angle of the camera that documented it. It is both discrete and omnipresent—far from being a mere seating object, it is the silent receptacle of the protocol, this performative memory. It mimics the filter through which the psychiatrized gesture is both constrained and (self)-observed.

A coat covered in a sugary solution is placed above the room, on the lighting grid. Crystallized, it becomes both a specter and a palpable presence. A storage room door is ajar—on it is a protocol given to the curator, instructing them to clean up traces of the action, the piles of sugar that will be erased from the space as the exhibition lives on. On the floor, in the doorway: bottles of bleach, to be used on the floor before each opening of the space to the public.

Through its opacity, Protocoles refers to the negotiation of a legacy of psychiatric violence. Escaping anamnesis—the narrative of oneself and one’s family in a medical context—Gobeil, through absence and repetition, simultaneously addresses both archive and fiction. The exhibition thus raises crucial questions about institutional transparency and the fragmentation of collective narratives. It embodies a reflection on the construction of the social memory of the psychiatricized, through its current impossibility.

Philippe Bourdeau, October 2024