Full On-Festival Art Therapy
Published in the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling in a special issue on Gilles Deleuze and Psychotherapy.
“I consider a festival to be an event composed of many occasions and situations; it has multiple pathways meeting expressive circumstances, serendipity, and the unusual”
“Pamela Whitaker, applies key Deleuzian notions such as nomadic subjectivity and the event to the domains of art therapy and the festival. The latter helps diffuse and redefine a subjectivity that is often entrenched within the transactional, bourgeois confines of the therapy room and allowed to literally walk off course and engage with rich multiplicities” Manu Bazzano, Special Issue Editor, Deleuze and Psychotherapy
Festival art therapy is a proposition for identity-in-the-making within events. The intensity and immersion of personal narratives within festival themes can extend identity into free association. The festival is composed of multiplies—simultaneous opportunities to enter and be impacted by words, sounds, visual culture and spectacle. It is an experience of becoming within a network of production. This is a consideration of art therapy as a public art form that utilises festival culture as a form of experiencing. The encounter with a festival extends a participant’s personal geography, in terms of discovering something different and beyond the already known. An arts festival is one way to produce affects that improvise with fixed identity formations. A festival can be considered a social prescription or cultural remedy with restorative impact.