La Devinière - Vincen Beekman

Through his collaborative practice of photography, Vincen Beeckman succeeds in abolishing the distance with his subjects and invites us to meet the residents of La Devinière.
This institutional psychotherapy center, founded in 1976 by Michel Hock as an alternative to the psychiatric hospital, was created to accommodate some twenty children with mental disorders and deemed incurable. They still reside there today. Free to move around, the residents organize their days according to their needs with the guidance of an attentive therapeutic team.
La Devinière delivers an intimate and powerful account of the life and different states of mind of this group who have lived together for many years in this place designed for them. True to his committed photography practice, Vincen Beeckman takes the time to build sincere and solid relationships. Every week or so, he goes to the center to meet the “kids” as they are familiarly called by the therapeutic team that has been following them since they were young. He plays chess or Uno with them, participates in parties and birthdays, shares their dramas and anxieties, brings gifts and receives them. He shows them his photographs and keeps a diary which he often writes in their presence.
The book alternates photographic sequences and extracts from Vincen Beeckman’s diary, reproduced in facsimile. The texts answer to the photos in a style style, almost telegraphic, telling the instantaneous, the absurd, the joys, the appeasements, the cries, the tensions, creations, games and loves. Their lives appear as the pages go by with a growing clearness. Raw, sometimes brutal. But subtly they meet the one of the common of mortals: we talk about hairstyles, shoes, confinement parties and vaccines.