(Proposal for an exhibition of photographs by the artist Zoran Pejic)
The Metamorphosis Workshop is one of seven, sometimes eight, workshops with different areas of focus organised in a French public hospital.
These workshops take place in the psychiatric unit for adolescents receiving day treatment.
Led by an artist and painter as part of the programme entitled “Esquisses”, the workshop holds two-hour sessions once a week throughout the school year. Before and after each session, a meeting brings together the artist, a nurse (present throughout the session), and the psychiatrist or psychologist responsible for the workshop (present for two half-hour periods), occasionally joined by a trainee.
At these meetings, the doctor informs the team about the patients’ health, after which the artist proposes a work plan. At the end, the team draws up a joint report on the working method and the results achieved. In working with the patients, the artist takes the details of their treatment into account, while the medical team proceeds from the conviction that playful, creative activity can be highly valuable to a scientific medical approach.
The daily workshop sessions are open to young people aged 11 to 20. They attend regularly, even during occasional periods of crisis when they are hospitalised. For them, these sessions are an invitation to have fun and express themselves freely, and they therefore take part of their own accord.
An abundance of new and used materials, fabrics, paper, spare parts and assorted waste is made available to them for this imaginative transformation. The process involves meticulously assembling different objects and materials, closely accompanied by the artist, who discreetly offers suggestions on how to work as the patients construct their bodily masks. In essence, it is a search for a person who is loved, hated or ridiculed… sometimes even shaped by illness.
It is a game of transformation into a desired real or imaginary person, a beloved public figure: an athlete, a character from film or comics, or a musician. The transformation may also involve a cherished object or an animal… whose form and meaning are determined by the patients’ most intimate pleasures and pain.
The choice of objects and materials for this transformation into “something else” takes place under the supervision and with the discreet collaboration of the artist, the workshop leader and the technician on duty.
The workshop leader’s extensive creative experience has enabled him to build up a large collection of carefully selected objects, discarded components and materials, which are made available to patients in the hospital workshop. The variety and vitality of these objects and materials, sometimes recycled from waste, are offered to the young patients as an invitation to play: all they need to do is approach this giant Christmas tree and freely help themselves to its unlikely gifts.
At the beginning of each session, a theme is proposed to guide their transformation into the real or imaginary figures or objects they would like to become. If fashion can be regarded as a second nature, capable of helping us understand ourselves and our actions, then the transformation these young patients undertake by constructing their masks and dressing outside all customary clothing habits and rules is not about variations in social dress codes.
The transformation allows them to become idealised figures, creatures or beings that embody their desires and ambitions, or inspire fear… all with the aim of turning towards their own personalities and expressing themselves freely through antipathy, sympathy and ideals. By the end, the patients achieve a complete transformation of their physical appearance.
The lasting result of this work is a photograph of their “final disguise”, their complete mask. Taken with an intimate understanding of the process, the photographs were made by the workshop leader, a visual artist. They are exhibited not only as a meaningful record of the patients’ subjective expression, but also as works of considerable artistic value.
Prof. Ljubomir Gligorijevic
Note: Public hospital in Pontoise, in the northern suburbs of Paris.
2012–2014: The Metamorphosis Workshop was created as part of the RAGA project, funded by the Ministry of Youth’s Social Experimentation Fund. ARESS / Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme was responsible for the project’s development.
2020–2022: The Metamorphosis Workshop was funded by the Rothschild Foundation.
2012–2022: The Metamorphosis Workshop operated within the L’Esquisse programme at René-Dubos Day Hospital in Pontoise.
Metamorphosis digital art: Ivan D. Milijić
Metamorphosis workshop facilitation and photography: Zoran S. Pejić
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