“Women are accused of insanity when they break the norm.” artist Laya Abril’s fascinating work on mass hysteria

The Catalan artist dismantles the mechanisms of gender alienation in his conceptual, documentary form. So his History of Misogyny which archives systemic violence against women; after an abortion (About abortion, 2016) and rape (About rape, 2020), Laya Abril catches mass hysteria. Meeting on the occasion of his exhibition at BAL in Paris *.

Madame Figaro. – The last part of your trilogy also forms the origin of what?
Laya Abril. – Because this is one of the first subjects I worked on. While researching for my series in Nepal in 2016 Menstruation Myths I came across an article from 2003 that described how dozens of schoolgirls had passed out for no apparent organic reason, a phenomenon that doctors attributed to the fact that all the teachers were men. The term genesis also refers to the origin of this disease, the first cases of which date back to the Middle Ages.

So what did you know about hysteria?
I knew of the images taken by Charcot at the Salpêtrière that were reproduced in the book Invention of Hysteria By Georges Didi-Huberman. But I had never heard of cases where these seizures occurred simultaneously in a group.

Are you replacing the individual perspective with the big picture? Why?
In her work on the epidemic of blackouts among Malaysian women workers in the 1970s, anthropologist Aihwa Ong describes this phenomenon as a form of physical resistance to both harsh working conditions and male dominance.This theory, as accepted by others, encouraged me to question it the possibility that power dynamics and structures cause these pathologies, that is, society’s responsibility.

A society that seems more interested in curing these diseases than finding their cause…
Women’s suffering has always been reduced to a condescending explanation, based on racist and colonialist interpretations. It has always been ignored or, on the contrary, overdiagnosed by Western medicine. Women suffer a kind of double punishment: either they are denied access to care, or they are over-medicalized. Either we fake it or we suffer seriously.

Women’s suffering has always been reduced to a condescending explanation based on racist, racist and colonial interpretations.

Laya Abril

One of your videos shows scenes of both fainting and protest.You sought to establish an equivalence between hysteria and rebellion.
The idea is to view mass hysteria as a “prelude to protest” unconsciously spoken by women who are immediately silenced or accused of insanity when they deviate from the norm or demand their rights.

Your project is structured around three case studies.What were your selection criteria?
These events take place in places that function as “total institutions”, in the sense of repressive micro-systems, in schools, sometimes in factories, recently in social networks. So I chose three contemporary cases that illustrate these types of environments: a 2007 outbreak of paralysis at a Catholic boarding school in Chalco, Mexico; An epidemic of fainting in factories in Cambodia between 2012 and 2014; and an outbreak of tics among students at New York’s Le Roy High School in 2012, one of the first cases to make it into the mainstream media.

You also conducted a series of interviews with various experts, sociologists, anthropologists, etc. Why did you turn to this community of experts?
Most of the information I collected was developing the same mystery around this evil, which was mostly perceived as a way to attract attention. A dialogue with several academics who studied the topic allowed me to better understand it. So I wanted to give their opinions, like the opinions of the press and local authorities without sharing them. It’s up to the audience to sort it out and put the puzzle together.

Is this a way to stay neutral?
Rather to show that there is no single and simple answer. My personal opinion is quite visible in the way I choose to point things out. As in the case of the Chalco boarding school, one of the forms of oppression was that students were not allowed to express themselves. in the mother tongue. With the help of the anthropologist Josefina Ramírez, I was able to translate the testimonies of the girls concerned and their families in Tlapanets, one of the forbidden dialects. At the exhibition, it makes the voices of other young women from the same communities heard.

You support your investigation with sixty-eight subfiles covering a wide geographic and temporal spectrum.Why this accumulation?
History repeats itself as the Ursuline Sisters of Loudoun in the 17th century^e century to the recent epidemics of tics on TikTok.It was important to show that this is a globalized phenomenon, not a geographic one, although it is clearly more developed in countries with more severe oppression systems.

Was it the question of compiling an atlas of women’s suffering?
Instead, map bursts of variety, acts of endurance.

* On mass hysteria, until May 18, at BAL in Paris. le-bal.fr:
See also laiaabril.com