“The intersection of art, anthropology, and medical science is vital for showcasing different perspectives on the latter. If we are open and curious enough to venture into that space, it can aid in self-reflection. I experienced this firsthand today at the “PARAVEL & CASTAING-TAYLOR Cosmic Realism” exhibition at the Amsterdam Eye Filmmuseum.

De Humani Corporis Fabrica installation (2022) presents “extensive research in five Parisian hospitals involving patients, doctors, and nurses, penetrating the human body.” I was taken aback by how the two artists portrayed medical science. In the expert perception, patients are seen as an extension of our medical art rather than as humans. It was the sober reminder that for centuries, since the 19th-century golden age of Western medicine, characterized by the rise of the scientist-doctor and evidence-based science, our approach has remained the same. Despite claims of patient-centricity in the age of patient empowerment, patients are still often viewed as evidence and data. Moreover, when we attempt to see their humanity, we frequently regard them as “others,” alien to our reality. The artists’ dilettante gaze into our medical art mirrors how much work we still have to do.

Another installation addressed the patient case of Issei Sagawa, a wealthy Japanese student who killed, cannibalized, and engaged in necrophilia with Renée Hartevelt, his Dutch classmate in Paris, in 1981. While the artists sought answers for his heinous act, I couldn’t shake off the echoes of my immigrant Congolese French parents’ words when Sagawa made headlines, “Thank God he wasn’t an African. Otherwise, the media would have deemed it normal and dragged us deep into the mud.” In the 1980s, the French media narrative still portrayed Africans as savage cannibals, an ignorant insult I encountered even in Kindergarten. Conversely, the Japanese were depicted as possessing threatening superior intelligence due to their perceived civilized scientific advancements surpassing France’s, especially in robotics. Besides, Sagawa came from an influential family known in the global banking scene, adding to the shock. Indeed, the French ruling class associated wealth and themselves with virtue, and poverty, meaning, others, with vice. It became the media narrative in France, like in the rest of the West.

Despite the disagreement of many French laypeople, including my poor immigrant parents, the magistrate, Judge Bruyère, declared Sagawa legally insane and unfit to stand trial. He committed the murderer to a psychiatric institution for life in 1983. Sagawa was later transferred to Japan in 1984 and released in 1985 by Japanese psychologists who deemed him psychologically competent. Many French experts blamed the perceived inferiority of Japanese culture (nothing was superior to France’s medical art then). Since Sagawa wasn’t prosecuted for his crime in France, he couldn’t be convicted in Japan either. He became a local celebrity and the artistic subject of that unoriginal explorative installation in 2024.

There are many other questions I would have liked to explore. What about Renée’s family’s perspective on this blatant injustice. It happened in the context of physical cannibalism committed in a country that participated in the reality cannibalism that was the European colonization of humanity. So what about the concept of normality and scientific expertise in a transcultural context? What does it mean for patients, and in this case, for the victims of murder in cases of legal insanity? How is qualified a culture to unilaterally determine what is normal or not when it rationalized and glorified murders, genocides, mass rapes, human trafficking, systematic thefts for so long and has just started to grip with the aftermath?

I hope my peers will reflect on these open questions. Meanwhile, the exhibition will remain open until May 20th.” https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/programme/paravel-castaing-taylor/1165744