Javier Téllez spent his childhood in close proximity to pathological behaviour. Both of his parents were psychiatrists, and his father received patients in the same room where he would play as a child. This familiarity would eventually develop into a prolific body of work around a central goal the articulation of a position of alterity and a strategy to give visibility to peripheral or neglected communities of individuals who live outside the parameters of a normal or healthy society. From an early age, Téllez often visited art museums and was struck by the hygienic spaces (and) enforced silence that reminded him of the hospital in which his father worked.² Téllez developed this influence into an unorthodox artistic practice that simultaneously critiques the psychiatric institution and the art museum. For Tellez, both institutions are symbolic representations of authority, founded on taxonomies based on the normal and the pathological, inclusion and exclusion.³

Téllez is perhaps best known for his collaborative films and performances with patients of psychiatric institutions - institutions that in his work are often situated in peripheral contexts where mental illness is directly tied to social class, reserved for the poor and underprivileged. This double marginality betrays an interest in the conflation of mental illness with a lack of productivity: while institutionalisation precludes participation in a capitalist system of production, psychotropic therapy seems to be an ever more pervasive manner of numbing symptoms so as to allow individuals, both within and outside of the mental institution, to assimilate to the norms and behaviours required for participating in this system. The work that best exemplifies this situation of extreme marginality is Choreutics (2001), a