Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the use of poetic writing to describe caring relationships expressed in artistic forms in the cultural centre of a Swiss psychiatric hospital, viewed by users as a place of “freedom” within an institution of constraint. How to write ethnography in a hopeful, caring and poetic way when dealing with intense psychic suffering?

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores poetic writing in order to describe caring relationships expressed in artistic forms in the artistic centre of a Swiss psychiatric hospital. Poetics has the evocative power to talk about suffering in a metaphoric, allusive way. It can also dramatize and overstate. Yet, some traumatic life experiences cannot be expressed otherwise (cf. Giordano, 2020).

This paper interrogates how we can incorporate emic and etic artistic materials within an ethnographic description involving mental suffering while acknowledging the political, oppressive structures at play in the creation of these aesthetics. Expressing experiences in a poetic, metaphoric, allegoric form becomes a way of caring for one another. Yet, the social realities of mental suffering are not always a matter of sublimation. How to translate affects and senses in a poetic way without mystifying suffering, occulting negative emotions as well as contextual elements in a place where psychological suffering and its sometimes violent manifestations towards oneself or others are part of the shaping and ontological rationale of the institution ? How to write ethnography in a hopeful, poetic and caring way, in particular towards persons that took part in this project, and simultaneously acknowledge the complex web of affects that constitute the social and political reality of the field? This paper explores such questions through concrete challenges at play in three ethnographic situations around the artistic centre of a Swiss psychiatric hospital.