CERFI - Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry

CERFI - Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry
Susana Caló e Godofredo Enes Pereira

488 pages, 6 x 9, paperback

From 1967–85, CERFI, a self-managed research collective, brought together students, militant groups, and professionals from the areas of psychiatry, architecture, and education. Emerging from the political struggles that led to May ’68—and featuring prominent members such as Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault—the group set out to explore alternatives to existing forms of urban governance via the institutional programming of “collective equipment” (social, cooperative, and local facilities). As the first comprehensive examination of CERFI, this publication recovers the group’s investigations on architecture, institutional practices, and urban governance, as well as its unique methods of research. The publication is based on a series of in-depth interviews with members of CERFI, which will be complemented by translations of original and unpublished texts, together with a broad range of visual and documental materials.

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“‘Only Desire Can Read Desire,’ wrote Félix Guattari, and this quote, which Caló and Pereira use as the title of their introduction, expresses the precious specificity of this book. Caló and Pereira’s desire to revive the passionate adventure of CERFI testifies to the fact that this adventure has become contemporary again, something like a resurgence, the reappearance of what had been eradicated and which is returning, transformed but alive.” – Isabelle Stengers

“Very important work has been done by Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira on the historical and visual reconstruction of a cultural experiment whose practical and theoretical effects have not yet been fully evaluated. – Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi