Lucienne Peiry's lecture at UNIL: "Poésie et spiritualité dans l'Art Brut"

Conference of Lucienne Peiry within the framework of the Master Seminar in Religious Sciences by Silvia Mancini, associate professor, focused on the comparative history of religions and the dissociated states of consciousness.

“One of the great discomforts of our civilization,” explains Claude Lévi-Strauss, “is that we have completely separated the order of the rational from the order of the poetic, whereas in all so-called primitive civilizations […], they are two orders tightly united.”
Many Art Brut creators have preserved this original alliance to allow these two orders to coexist naturally. In their everyday lives, poetry takes on multiple forms. Some cultivate sensitive ties with nature and the cosmos, listening to or even aligning with them, like a Zen archer. Others claim they are accompanied by celestial or astral powers, guided by a god, by spirits, by their ancestors, or by voices.
Art Brut authors display a particular availability, a sort of exploratory state where reason relaxes, allowing them to escape reality. Their perception and imagination are heightened. From then on, their sensory capacities unfold and their mental concentration intensifies – sometimes in a shamanistic style. Many achieve what could be called a form of transcendence, surpassing a determined reality order.

Lucienne Peiry invites students of Prof. Silvia Mancini to discover some creators who, in Bali, China, or Italy, have built symbolic universes that connect them to the visible and the invisible.

Wednesday, December 11 at 2 p.m.,
Room 5018, 5th floor of the Anthropole,
University of Lausanne

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