Ulysses was born in Trieste is a research project, an exhibition and a programme of performances and conversations initiated by the artist Dora Garcia together with students from HEAD Genève’s Work.Master and Building programmes and a number of guests. A three-day programme, from 16 to 18 April, will activate the four-week exhibition.

The project, whose title is borrowed from a lecture on James Joyce by the writer Italo Svevo in Milan in 1927, is based on a ‘clinical’ analysis of the specific type of language developed by people considered to have the various symptoms associated with schizophrenia. The outlines of this language, as analysed in particular in Emil Kraepelin’s seminal work Über Sprachstörungen im Traume (‘On speech disorders in dreams’), published in 1906 (lack of purpose or goal, ‘asyndetic’ thinking, metonymic distortion, interpenetration of themes, neologisms corresponding to new concepts, portmanteau words, multidirection, ignorance of social conventions related to speech), are repeated in ‘prodigious parallelism’ in the language of avant-garde literature, cinema and art.

The recurrence of two stylistic figures – condensation and displacement – has also been noticed in dreams. Dreams, disordered thinking, experimental language: ‘Joyce explained to me that the bread a child dreams of eating can’t be the same as the bread he eats when he’s awake; the child can’t transfer all the qualities of the bread to the dream. Therefore, the bread in the dream wouldn’t be made of everyday flour but rather of “flower”, a word that would take away certain qualities of the bread and give it others better suited to a dream’ (Italo Svevo). And also ‘With books as with people I consider complete understanding to be somewhat uninteresting’ (Robert Walser).

Ulysses was born in Trieste, a city whose cosmopolitanism was about to vanish with the rise of fascism after the First World War, that was home to an astonishing number of different nationalities and resonated to the first concepts of psychoanalysis (newly imported from Vienna), and that spoke so many languages it could not make up its mind which one was its own. Later, when not only Ulysses but also Finnegans Wake was born, Trieste would witness Franco Basaglia’s revolution which led to the abolition of psychiatric hospitals and the concept of ‘social dangerousness’ throughout Italy.

The relationship between symptoms and symbols, grammar and time, dream and delirium, metaphor and neologism and the possibility of interpreting or translating the question of language as proposed by psychoanalysis provide a new angle from which to observe the work of various artists and thinkers, as well as the production not only of works of art but also of new forms of presentation.