The ArchiMed project welcomes the historian Jessica Schüpbach, as postdoc
With experience in the cultural and museum world (contemporary art, outsider art or "art brut"), as well as in the conservation of artistic collections, Jessica Schüpbach completed a PhD in social and cultural history. She studied the history of the psychiatric hospital of Marsens (Fribourg) through its medical archives and the written traces left by its actors (patients, relatives, doctors). She then joined the project "Cinema and Psychiatry in Switzerland and Europe" (led by Mireille Berton) and worked on the film collection of the psychiatric institution Waldau in Bern.
Her research explores different types of psychiatric archives and collections, considering their material dimension and paying particular attention to people who have been invisible in history up until now. Her first book, Encres, traces, papiers. L'art d'écrire à l'Asile de Marsens, 1875 – 1900, is currently in the process of being published.
In the Archimed project, she will reconstruct the biographies of patients whose anatomical specimens were taken and preserved in collections being studied, particularly in Geneva. This approach will restore the existential and human depth to these collections, as well as to the various aspects of the research conducted within Archimed (biological, archeogenetic, bioinformatics, clinical research). It will also involve maintaining a close dialogue between scientific and biological data, institutional pathways, and life situations.
Among the possibilities for scientific restitution, the audio route will be explored and likely favored for its ability to give voice to silenced and forgotten individuals, but also for its potential to awaken the listener's imagination—two functions that resonate directly with the researchers' position, listening to the sources and their silences.
The Museum of Dr Charles Ladame, Bel-Air Psychiatric Clinic 1925, Geneva.
© Archives of the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne
10 Feb 2025
