Véréna Paravel
Bats in my belfry - Installation - 2024
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 26
I started psychoanalysis to free myself from traumas. When I had to physically distance myself from the analyst’s office, my analytical work continued by phone. While talking, I began to doodle—words, figures, forms, images. These spontaneous creations are fragments of my unconscious, opaque and silent offerings, riddles with too many unknowns, uncontrolled eruptions of inner magma. They never had any other destiny or pretense than to spread through the phone to my “assalyst” I had never drawn, painted, or made collages before. In two and a half years, more than 600 of these secretions gnawed at the live memory of his phone. Secret secretions, they were never mentioned in psychoanalysis sessions.
Since my analyst refused to participate in a film about psychoanalysis, I replaced him with a real “assalyst” also a Lacanian.
Véréna Paravel
An anthropologist, filmmaker, editor, producer and artist, Véréna Paravel's work combines ethnographic research into the understanding of life with political and ecological issues. Since 2006, Véréna Paravel has been working with Lucien Castaing-Taylor at Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. They have made several films together, including Leviathan (2012), somniloquies(2013), Ah Humanity(2015, with Ernst Karel), Caniba(2017), and De Humani Corporis Fabrica(2023). These works have been shown at a number of festivals, including Berlin, Toronto, Venice and Cannes. Véréna Paravel is a visiting professor at Harvard University and a member of the graduate faculty of the École des Arts Politiques at Sciences Po Paris.
