A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.
—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
In their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari reimagined the schizophrenic not as a pathological subject but as a figure who ‘deterritorialises’ fixed structures of identity and social organisation. Where psychoanalysis understood desire as repression and sublimation—organised through the familial structure of the Oedipus complex—Deleuze and Guattari proposed ‘schizoanalysis’, a practice that connects bodies, systems, and ecologies in open-ended assemblages. Always intended as a tool for social and political transformation, schizoanalysis was never confined to the clinic.
Curated by Institute of Modern Art Adjunct Curator Stephanie Berlangieri, Desire Is a Machine brings together artists who understand desire not as a lack to be fulfilled but as a generative, machinic force coursing through all life. The artists engage with the legacy of schizoanalysis by reorienting how mental health is understood, foregrounding connections between living beings, technologies and other entities, and conceptualising the flows of capital and information. The exhibition shifts focus from the individual psyche to the collective and relational, affirming desire’s capacity to disrupt, reimagine, and reorganise the world.
Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato present a video essay exploring the political, ecological and psychic dimensions of Guattari’s concept of the assemblage. Drawing on his involvement in institutional psychotherapy in postwar France, the work considers how institutions—not only individuals—can be sites of transformation.
The late Graeme Doyle lived with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. His drawings from the late 1970s explore religious iconography, identity and the fragmented self. They are presented alongside audio recordings of his poems.
Aurélien Froment has created an archive centred on Louis Wolfson, an American writer diagnosed with schizophrenia. Unable to tolerate English, Wolfson devised a method of instantaneous translation, allowing him to ‘hear’ it as a hybrid language of his own invention.
Ueinzz Theatre Company is a radical São Paulo-based ensemble of professional and non-professional actors whose experimental performances explore collective subjectivity, altered states and the politics of care. Working with Pedro França and Rodrigo Sano Calazans, their output unsettles boundaries between art, therapy, and social life.
Stuart Ringholt’s installation draws from his personal archive to reflect on his experience of psychosis and recovery during a period of illness after travelling in India in the early 1990s. The work assembles clinical records, photographs, memorabilia and personal objects to document a time of acute vulnerability and change.
Giselle Stanborough’s glow-in-the-dark wall paintings scramble Britney Spears’s mediatised image with Freudian and Deleuzo-Guattarian ideas of freedom, will, and desire.
Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato present a video essay exploring the political, ecological and psychic dimensions of Guattari’s concept of the assemblage. Drawing on his involvement in institutional psychotherapy in postwar France, the work considers how institutions—not only individuals—can be sites of transformation.
Artists: Graeme Doyle, Stuart Ringholt and Giselle Stanborough (Australia); Pedro França and Rodrigo Sano with Ueinzz Theatre Company (Brazil); Aurélien Froment (Scotland/France); Fritz Kahn (Germany); and Angela Melitopoulos (Greece/Germany) and Maurizio Lazzarato (France/Italy).
Curator Bio
Stephanie Berlangieri is a curator, researcher, and writer. She is an Adjunct Curator at the IMA and Curator Research at Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne. Previously, she has held curatorial positions at Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and Sydney Biennale in Gadigal/Sydney. She has written for Art Monthly Australasia, Art Asia Pacific, Artist Profile, and Art and Australia. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.
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