Artists Deborah Fischer and Mehdi Besnaiou at the Dreux sanatorium
Within the framework of a seminar organized by Manifesto and POUSH for Alderan and its team, two artists of POUSH were involved in workshops at the sanatorium de Dreux.
The artists Mehdi Besnaiou and Deborah Fischer took possession of the soul of the sanatorium of Dreux in order to propose an ambulatory "auscultation" of the place, through performances and workshops.
The performance Destination première imagined by Deborah Fischer allowed the reanimation of history by revealing the spirit of the place through an artistic walk, thanks to letters of former patients, testimonies and photographic and written archives. In a participative discovery process, Deborah Fischer has conceived this moment as a performance punctuated by the passage between the past and the future of the sanatorium.
Mehdi Besnaiou's performance, renamed LOST DOCTOR, has engaged a marked path in which the artist has staged several rooms of the site, thus turning the function of the Sanatorium upside down while including its mythology in an imaginary way: what was at the time an old refectory is transformed into a laboratory of scientists with zany experiments. The performance offers an imaginary, supernatural and immersive world, satirizing metaphysical, psychological and socio-cultural considerations.