On Mass Hysteria. Une histoire de la misogynie - édition limitée

The limited edition of On Mass Hysteria includes the book and a limited print run of 15 copies.

This artist’s book, which combines photographs, texts and testimonials, explores the theme of societal oppression of women by bringing together thousands of cases of what has long been called “collective hysteria”.

This phenomenon, triggered by severe trauma, strikes close-knit communities confronted with situations of major stress. These groups develop sudden symptoms that have no physiological cause, and can last for months: fainting spells, tremors, inextinguishable laughter, trances… As usual, the artist worked upstream with anthropologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to try to understand the origins of these crises. Through a wide range of archives, Laia Abril shows their formidable geographical and temporal scope. From 15th-century Salem witches to convulsing possessed nuns, from schoolgirls in a Mexican boarding school who suddenly lose their ability to walk to Cambodian factory workers who simultaneously faint, Laia Abril studies the circumstances that lead to these states. These psychogenic mass illnesses, as they are now called, appear to be a common response to collective suffering which, for various reasons, cannot be verbalized, embodying transgenerational traumas, often ignored or downplayed by society. Some scientists interpret them as a protolanguage that women have been using to resist since the dawn of time, without being aware of it.

Laia Abril questions the Western view, in particular the hyper-medicalization that ignores women’s suffering, and tends to neglect explanations based on spiritual beliefs and spirit forces. The artist seeks to shift the analysis from a victim-blaming narrative to an examination of the role of women’s political and social oppression in the manifestation of a collective illness.