Intimate places

playgrounds for self-exploration

Authors

  • David Habets Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC Location AMC, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Julian Kiverstein Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC Location AMC, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Erik Rietveld Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC Location AMC, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Damiaan Denys Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC Location AMC, Amsterdam, Netherlands https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3191-3844

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59391/inscriptions.v7i2.252

Keywords:

mental health, play, association, free

Abstract

Our essay starts from our first-person experience of visiting El Eco Experimental Museum in Mexico City. Over the course of our visit, El Eco became, what we will call an ‘intimate place’ in which we were able to explore personal thoughts, memories, and feelings. We go on to compare El Eco to Black Water (2021), a site-specific art installation by RAAAF. We draw on Donald Winnicott’s work on play to show how intimate places like the El Eco museum have commonalities with the therapeutic setting of psychotherapy. They are places that enable people to freely associate by enabling a visitor to be in a state of relaxation, and by affording a rich array of disruptive possibilities for self-exploration. We understand such intimate places as playgrounds that can (temporarily) disrupt rigid patterns of resistance or avoidance, enabling a person to confront difficult emotions and experiences that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Author Biographies

  • David Habets, Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC Location AMC, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    David Habets practice revolves around making place-based art installations and staging material
    performances. He operates on the crossroads of visual arts, landscape architecture and humanities.
    Over the last fifteen years Habets has been making a series of large-scale site-specific artworks as a
    core-member of RAAAF (Still Life, Deltawork //, HiddenWorlds, Intensive Care a.o.). Habets’ work
    is concerned with mental and physical pollution of our living environment through staging fragile,
    temporary art installations that slowly degrade, dissolve, or wash away over time. He has founded
    several art/science collectives to explore wide ranging topics from lichen (WAAE) to the zoo
    (ZOOOF), to resource depletion (LiCo), working closely with architects, lichenologists, anthropologists,
    and political scientists. His work has honored him with invitations to the HKW in Berlin
    and Art/Science program at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), a
    fellowship at van Eyck Academy and as PhD candidate in explorative architecture and philosophy at
    the AMC department of psychiatry with the project landscapes of stress.

  • Julian Kiverstein, Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC Location AMC, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Julian Kiverstein is Senior Researcher in the Department of Psychiatry at the Amsterdam University Medical Centre. His research takes place at the intersection of phenomenology and existentialism, philosophy of neuroscience, psychiatry and 4E cognitive science. He is co-author (with Michael Kirchhoff) of Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing published by Routledge in 2019, and has published over 90 peer reviewed articles.

  • Erik Rietveld, Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC Location AMC, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Erik Rietveld is a Socrates Professor at the University of Twente and a VICI laureate at the University
    of Amsterdam (Amsterdam UMC, Department of Psychiatry / Philosophy). Earlier he was a Fellow
    in Philosophy at Harvard University. He works on the philosophy of skilled action, change-ability,
    and ecological psychology. Rietveld has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant and VENI, VIDI and
    VICI grants by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Together with his brother Ronald Rietveld he
    founded the multidisciplinary collective for visual art, experimental architecture and philosophy
    RAAAF in 2006. RAAAF’s artworks have received numerous awards and have been exhibited
    widely at international museums and biennales for contemporary art. The brothers were responsible
    for Vacant NL, the successful Dutch contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010. In 2023
    they received the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, a distinction given as an oeuvre award
    under the patronage of UNESCO, for their pioneering experimental approach. Ronald and Erik
    Rietveld are life members of the Society of Arts of The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and
    Sciences (KNAW). His academic website is: www.erikrietveld.com.

  • Damiaan Denys, Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam UMC Location AMC, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Damiaan Denys is a faculty professor of psychiatry at the University of Amsterdam (UVA). He has
    published more than 500 scientific articles; pioneered the application of deep brain stimulation in
    psychiatric disorders and received the 2020 IgNobel Prize for his discovery of misophonia. Since
    2024, he leads an interdisciplinary scientific center at the intersection of psychiatry, psychotherapy
    and philosophy. His book, “The Deficit of Excess,” offers a penetrating analysis of our sick relationship
    with healthy psychological suffering. His latest book, “Psychotherapy in Motion,” describes
    the combination of psychotherapy with boxing. In addition to science, he focuses on broad social
    issues of fear, control, happiness, normality and meaning. He wrote and acted in 2015 a theatrical
    monologue about anxiety with which he toured the Netherlands and Belgium. Denys is widely
    known for his honest questions and courageous positions in complex debates.

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Published

2024-07-15

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Academic articles