Yvo Cho, La Borde, 2025

La Borde (2025) is a moving image work by Yvo Cho presented for the first time on the occasion of his solo exhibition “The brain is not a ready-made machine” held at INCURVA in 2025. The work, produced by INCURVA, continues Cho’s experimental use of camera technologies to document specific locations or architectures; in this case, La Borde the psychiatric clinic where the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari began practicing in 1955. The title of the show is taken from an essay by François Tosquelles, who, together with Jean Oury, pioneered ‘Institutional Psychotherapy’ in post-war France. [1] Oury founded La Borde in the French town of Cour-Cheverny, where he was joined soon after by Guattari who worked there for the rest of his life. The clinic was distinct in that it was set up in a 19th Century château in the countryside rather than the type of architecture typically associated with psychiatry. Cho visited Cour-Cheverny, where the clinic is still in operation today, and filmed the château and grounds using a camera modified to record light beyond the spectrum visible to the human eye; for example, stonework and foliage are rendered in lysergic tones of fuchsia and magenta. Rather than high-contrast naturalism, La Borde (2025) presents its subject as otherworldly, echoing the impressionistic vignettes that comprise La petite Borde (2012) – the memoir written by Guattari’s daughter Emmanuelle about growing up at the clinic – which describe a world usually unseen.

Yvo Cho
La Borde, 2025
Full HD video, sound
10 min 24 sec
Produced by INCURVA

[1] In Psychotherapy and Materialism: Essays by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury, ed. by Marlon Miguel and Elena Vogman, Cultural Inquiry, 31 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024), pp. 47–88