Javier Téllez

Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) is a video installation by the Venezuela-born and New York-based artist Javier Téllez, which was inspired by the famous painting of the same name by Hieronymus Bosch. Created around 1490–1500, Bosch’s painting illustrates the popular allegory of a Ship of Fools and may have been related to Sebastian Brant’s equivalently titled book of satirical poems, which was published in Basel in 1494 and tells of a ship laden and steered by fools that sets sail for Narragonia, the “fool’s paradise”. 

Responding to a commission from Kunstmuseum Thurgau to produce a new piece in the Swiss Canton of Thurgau, Téllez researched a rather obscure episode of Michel Foucault’s biography, his visit to Switzerland in 1954, where the young philosopher witnessed a carnival involving both patients and staff of the psychiatric clinic in Münsterlingen on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance. This unforgettable experience triggered Foucault’s interest in the carnivalesque aspects of madness, which he later addressed in his seminal book History of Madness. 

Téllez, who had a similar experience as a child, watching carnivals at the psychiatric hospital where his father worked as a psychiatrist, and has spent decades producing film installations with people with cognitive impairment, was naturally fascinated by the story. He decided to recreate the allegory of the Ship of Fools on Lake Constance with people who had undergone psychiatric treatment. Together, they embarked upon a symbolic journey in search of a new Narragonia, where definitions of normalcy and pathology disintegrate and stigmas disappear.

Javier Téllez is a Venezuelan artist and filmmaker who was born in 1969 in Valencia, Venezuela. He currently lives and works in New York City.