Unfolding Desire Assembly | Saturday, September 26, 2026
10 AM–12:30 PM: Morning Session
Courtroom 302, Vancouver Art Gallery
Welcome Remarks
Introduction: Elham Puriya Mehr
Presentation: Francesca Lazzarini | Unfolding Desire Project
Francesca Lazzarini presents Unfolding Desire, the project she co-curated with Elham Puriya Mehr in Trieste in 2025, organized by Cultural Inventory and Air Trieste, in partnership with La Collina Social Cooperative, Trieste Contemporanea and Griffin Art Projects. The project took place in the former psychiatric hospital of San Giovanni, which in the late 1970s was the epicentre of a profound transformation of the mental health system through the work of Franco Basaglia, and is still at the core of an ecology of care grounded in the principles of deinstitutionalisation and the urge for social transformation. Tracing the encounters that unfolded throughout the project—between artists Ofri Cnaani and Evann Siebens, the people who animate every day San Giovanni through forms of radical imagination, and the visions emerging from the materials held in Oltre il Giardino documentation centre—the talk explores the connection between desires of the past, their reactivation in the present and their projection into the future.
Presentation: Ofri Cnaani | Archiving Proximities
Drawing on critical theory that addresses digitization and classification and extends archival problematics into computational environments, artist and researcher Ofri Cnaani explores the history of mental health deinstitutionalization to ask what it can teach us about present-day systems of documentation, memory and preservation. Beginning with materials preserved in Trieste and the artistic and collaborative work developed through the research project Unfolding Desires, Cnaani examines how residues of past institutional structures, including confinement and the “total institution,” persist within contemporary processes of digitization and classification. The talk situates experimental and artistic encounters practised in Trieste within archival theory, considering them as a site for thinking about archival futurity. It focuses on the notion of “relational classification,” a participatory artistic method that arranges documents, objects, texts and testimonies through social and contextual relations, adjacency and proximity of thought rather than through fixed metadata or institutional taxonomies.
Presentation: Pantxo Ramas | From Trieste to Barcelona: Infrastructuring Care
Pantxo Rama’s intervention will start from archival materials held in Trieste, drawing on texts and debates from The Crisis of Welfare conference held in 1981. These materials will frame Basaglian deinstitutionalization as a political movement within and beyond mental healthcare. The main question will revolve around the conference itself and Basaglia and Maccacaro’s hypothesis of the “crime of peace,” leading to questioning what institutions can do in a hostile political environment, then but also today.
Crucially, he will address the role the “technician” can play in emancipation—a question that remains urgent today, and one that proves particularly significant in arts practice. Here Rotelli’s reading of Kantor becomes essential: while “the artist must be responsible,” Rotelli extends this claim to technicians of practical knowledge, arguing that both share a commitment to projects of transformation. These projects—which alone make knowledge possible—require artists, poets, filmmakers and plural subjects meeting together. The technician’s responsibility and the artist’s responsibility converge in a shared invention of institutions.
Q&A
12:30–1:30 PM: Lunch
1:30–4 PM: Afternoon Session
Courtroom 302, Vancouver Art Gallery
Introduction: Elham Puriya Mehr
Presentation: Erika Dyck | Finding Creativity in Mad Archives: Discovering Desire Amidst Deinstitutionalization
History of madness in the second half of the 20th century is often characterized in liberating terms—new medications led to a growing confidence in managing mental health, while radical patients and their allies lobbied for more autonomy from a medical system. The era of deinstitutionalization opened new doors for patients and ex-patients living in communities, but some of the radical experimentations in both medicine and politics resurrected old patterns of capitalism and colonialism that diluted the optimism associated with the idea that communities could learn to provide care without institutional walls or economic incentives. In this presentation, Erika Dyck will go into the archives to retrieve a case of a bold experiment from the Canadian Prairies that found psychiatrists rejecting orthodox approaches and instead looking to their patients and First Nations families to learn how to care for one another. The research was part of an emerging era of psychedelic science, but led first and foremost by a desire to empathize with difference.
Presentation: Cathy Busby | I Wonder: An Art / Care Project
Connecting to the Assembly’s themes of mental health and artistic labour, this visual presentation begins with a description of two projects, Quarantine Countdown and I WONDER, made in long-term care facilities in Vancouver in 2021 during COVID, where Cathy Busby’s late partner, the artist Garry Neill Kennedy (d. 2021), was living and experiencing late-stage dementia. They were made with Kennedy’s presence and participation. To make Kennedy more sentient, more felt, Busby will play a few minutes of a 1990 interview with him. She will also talk about making the book I WONDER: Art + Care + Dementia (2024), which involved assembling photos and writing about the pair’s artist lives and the years of care work. Making the book involved revisiting and making new sense of those dementia years, and then shaping them around their much bigger and longer lives. Its reception and the ongoing sharing of stories and conversations have included many heartfelt responses from people who can see their experiences within the book, creating a network of shared interest in art and care as pain reliever.
Presentation: Sol Hashemi, Gallery Gachet | Reclaiming the Conditions of Realization: On Picnic For a N(n)ervous System
“The modality of the imaginary is that of potentiality; it only becomes the modality of unreality if the individual is deprived of access to the conditions of realization.” —Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention, 2023
This talk considers the possibility of the artwork to be both outcome and seed of an ecological process of genesis across the cyclic phases of the image; anticipation, perception, symbolization and invention. Gallery Gachet’s exhibition Picnic For a N(n)ervous System: Von Coffin & Warren Neidich will be discussed in relation to the organization’s history: founded by artists connected to the mental health consumer and psychiatric survivor movement. Rather than seen as expression, communication or rational argument, Von Coffin and Warren Neidich’s artwork will be explored through aesthetic and technical analysis to perceive these object-images as organisms, leading to an art that does not just propose a way of living, but an attentiveness to the particularities of life.
Panel Discussion: All Presenters
Q&A
5–7 PM: Evening Session
Studio of Evann Siebens
Artist Studio Visit and Reception
Performance: Studio Visit, Interrupted
The Unfolding Desire Assembly is presented as part of the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Art of Wellbeing initiative, in collaboration with Griffin Art Projects and Empty Space Art Studio Society. The Assembly is generously supported by the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region (Italy) and the Canada Council for the Arts, whose ongoing commitment to artistic research and creation in Canada we gratefully acknowledge.
We also acknowledge the organizations that supported the Unfolding Desire project in Trieste (2025), with special thanks to the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region for its generous contribution. The project was realized by AiR Trieste and Cultural Inventory, in partnership with La Collina Social Cooperative, Trieste Contemporanea, and Griffin Art Projects.