SFS 2025 Panel:
Brickolage: Building Spaces of Care with French Literature, Film, and Art

Madeleine Chalmers (University of Leicester), mcc54@leicester.ac.uk; and Benjamin Dalton (Lancaster University), b.dalton@lancaster.ac.uk

Bricolage has many potential translations: tinkering, making do, DIY, MacGyvering. It is a process of combining odds and ends in order to make something that ‘does the job’, something that ‘works’. In the hands of thinkers such as Michel de Certeau, it has been associated with incremental social rebellion and the quiet reclamation of ground from hegemonic structures. It has also found its way into the life sciences, in the work of French biologists Jacques Monod and François Jacob.

With this panel, we seek to mobilise these key facets of bricolage: its practicality, scavenger methodology, creativity, and potential for subversive transformation in multiple fields. In order to do so, we will engage with the term at a thematic and methodological level, by sharing papers on bricolage’s conceptual potential and modelling the bricolage of our own thought processes and intellectual exchange. This panel therefore adopts an innovative alternative format.

It begins with two traditional academic papers, which reflect on practices of bricolage in the construction of spaces of care, inside and outside institutional settings. Where Benjamin Dalton’s paper draws on bricolage to think through how literature and film can help us to rethink hospital design, mine reframes the elaboration of so-called ‘visionary environments’ by outsider artists as therapeutic world-making.

In place of a third speaker, we will respond to one another’s papers (moderated by the panel chair), before opening up to the floor for questions. The panel will culminate in an interactive opportunity for listeners to assemble their own bricolage structures collaboratively, whether acting out scenarios or building models of new and innovative therapeutic environments. This progression reflects the process of academic bricolage: the bolting together of elements from different sources within an individual paper, the sharing of tools with a colleague, the appraisal and suggestions of fellow bricoleurs and bricoleuses working in different areas – and ultimately the concrete, collective, unexpected construction of something new.

Defining bricolage in La Pensée sauvage (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss emphasises that it creates structure from events, like the wild pansy of his punning title thrusting out roots into whatever soil it finds. We hope that this event-panel will be fertile ground for participants to lay foundations for new connections and structures.

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1. Constructing the hospital in contemporary French literature and film: clinical design as bricolage from Martin Winckler’s Le Choeur des femmes (2009) and L’école des soignantes (2019) to Claire Simon’s Notre corps (2023)

Benjamin Dalton (Lancaster University), b.dalton@lancaster.ac.uk

This paper maps engagements with hospital environments and clinical architecture in contemporary French literature and documentary film, focusing in particular on Martin Winckler’s novels Le Choeur des femmes (2009) and L’école des soignantes (2019); and Claire Simon’s documentary film Notre corps (2023). My argument is that these literary and filmic texts do not seek solely to represent or describe present and existing hospital environments, but rather engage with and intervene within clinical environments through gestures of bricolage which hold the potential to co-create or co-build alongside these environments their future transformation, re(construction) and (re)design. Martin Winckler’s duology of novels, Le Choeur des femmes (2009) and L’école des soignantes (2019), document innovative new forms of care in a gynaecological department (2009) and in a future hospital psychiatry department (2019), imagining radically de-hierarchized and emancipatory new forms and spaces of care. Claire Simon’s Notre corps (2023), meanwhile, documents the daily life within a gynaecological department. Simon’s camera, I will argue, documents the present reality of a working hospital department whilst leaving space for speculative imagination and design of future transformed healthcare spaces. I bringing together Winckler and Simon, I will explore how, in a mutually transformative encounter, contemporary writers and filmmakers are able to create and imagine new conceptions of health/care and healthcare environments; and, in return, how these theorized new healthcare environments might intervene and collaborate with the interdisciplinary teams designing the hospitals of the future.
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2. Visionary Environments and Structures of Feeling

Madeleine Chalmers (University of Leicester), mcc54@leicester.ac.uk

In Marxism and Literature (1977), Raymond Williams described ‘structures of feeling’ as ‘meanings and values as they are actually lived and felt’. This paper studies meanings and values as they are actually built and inhabited. Taking as its focus the visionary environment sculpted by the abbé Fouré (1839–1910) on a remote corner of the Breton coast, this paper highlights the ways in which human beings wrest structure from this entanglement in ways that do not fit conceptual frameworks of extraction or domination.
The paper begins by situating and problematising the term ‘visionary environment’, which describes the artistic transformation of a lived-space (a cell, home, or garden) through the bricolage repurposing of everyday materials. The term is associated with so-called ‘outsider artists’: individuals with minimal formal education and no artistic training who are often marginalized or even institutionalized, in asylums, care homes, or other secure environments. The paper then moves to the specific case of Fouré. Upon his retirement from parish life following a stroke, he began to fill and then surround his isolated home with wooden sculptures. Some were anonymous, some recognizable as historical figures or obscure local saints. Gradually, his sculpting extended to the coastline, as he carved large-scale, sinuous, three-dimensional figures directly into the cliff-face.

Placing Fouéré’s experience of stroke-related partial paralysis and hearing loss in dialogue with insights from phenomenological psychiatry and neurodiversity studies, this paper proposes a décloisonnement of the ‘visionary environment’. Rather than framing it as the chasse gardée of the ‘outsider’, it argues that the world-making processes staged by Fouré and others are concrete structures of feeling which hint at new possibilities for all of us to think the interaction of mind, body, and world.

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3. Panel discussion: bricolage within the institutional framework


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4. Interactive activity: building spaces of care