Join visiting cultural theorist Valeria Graziano for the following talk:
What Is Not Hell: On Treatment
6pm, Thursday April 23rd
Studio Interact / C1-04
“…seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space.”
— Italo Calvino
Taking up Calvino’s invitation to recognize “what is not hell,” the talk reflects on how the fragile alternatives we may organize are made to endure within the damaged conditions of our world. This talk proposes the idea of “treatment” as a way of naming a set of questions and responses across social movements and within artistic and social projects. Treatment here names the ways a practice handles (“treats”) what it wants to give space to: images, bodies, materials, affects, supports, and publics. To treat is to join form to care, mediation to maintenance, and binding aesthetic decisions to their political consequences.
At the same time, the term should be used with caution, as it is entangled with the therapeuticization of life and the expectation that all difficulties can be made curable or manageable. In tension with this problem, I touch on the process of deinstitutionalization initiated in Trieste around Franco Basaglia which led to shutting down the institution of the asylum, as a site that activists and patients reclaimed “treatment” from medical authority and coercion, opening it instead toward practices of collective emancipation.
Valeria Graziano is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at the Centre for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe (CAS SEE), University of Rijeka. Her research sits at the intersection of artistic practice, radical pedagogy and social movement organising, focusing on refusal of work, repair, conviviality, and the political uses of pleasure as collective tactics for surviving the everyday violences of capitalist productivity. She is among the initiators of Pirate Care Syllabus, which connects practices that resist the criminalisation of solidarity, and and Transversal Institutional Analysis Network. She is co author of Pirate Care: Insurgent Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Pluto Press, 2025), Figure It Out. The Art of Living Through System Failures (Drugo More, 2024), and co editor of the special issue of ephemera journal, Repair Matters(2019). Her monograph on militant conviviality is forthcoming with Bristol University Press in 2027, and she is currently working on an experimental publication engaging the legacy of Franco Rotell.
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This talk was organized by Studio Interact (undergraduate art class)
in dialog with the Eco-Social MA