Abstract/Summary

The Second Annual Report from the Strategic Sanctuary for the Destruction of Free Will is an installation and live performance that explore the construction of subjectivity. A skin of white cardboard and black tape covers the entire gallery. Here, group therapy room and padded cell, workstation and recreational space merge into each other, producing an environment that is situated somewhere between the psychiatric institute and an LSD cult. Through this architectural intervention, the exhibition addresses the processes and environments that enable the production of subjectivity and the way in which, under neo-liberalism, this form of labour is valorised. It stages a tension between an ethos of self-expression, flexibility and individualism and a regulating system that monitors one’s well-being and suitability for work. Drawing on the ideas of the psychedelic culture of the sixties, the anti-psychiatry movement led by R. D. Laing and more recent writing on the biopolitics of pharmaceutical control, the project aims to think through the possibility of collectivity in a society that demands the total management of individual, private experience.