The Art of Madness: Catastrophe, Memory, Desire
Live transcription is available here.
This panel concludes the 47th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference, “Living in Madness: Decolonization, Creation, Healing.”
Three multimedia artists whose work forges pathways to healing amid trauma and grief will present recent works and reflect in dialogue about their creative processes.
Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, “teacher of things unwell,” and editor of the collective hybrid book art project, Open in Emergency, which takes a decolonizing approach to mental health by asking “what Asian American unwellness looks like and how to tend to that unwellness.”
Bazeed is a multi-genre writer, editor, curator, and performer, whose recent projects include a book-length erasure poem of Daniel Defoe’s creative nonfiction account of London’s bubonic plague. Their resulting book-length erasure, Plague Year Most Remarkable, carves out the language of that other, older archive into an extended anaphora poem, a moirologia in the face of capitalism’s insistence on the discursive & practical relegation of certain bodies to disposability.
Writer, artist, and arts educator Jess X. Snow wrote and directed the film Little Sky, the story of a non-binary drag sensation who returns to their hometown to face their estranged father and the childhood memories that continue to haunt them.
These artists will discuss their works and the questions that circulate among them with moderator, writer, and Barnard librarian Vani Natarajan, MFA Candidate in Poetry at Queens College.
Join us on YouTube on 4/12 at 6:30 PM ET. RSVP encouraged.
Conference Detail
The 47th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference organized by BCRW is entitled “Living in Madness: Decolonization, Creation, Healing.” The conference will be virtual and sessions will take place over a period of weeks from February to April, 2022.
This conference will explore experiences of madness, disability, survival, and refusal through the frameworks of mad studies, disability justice, and artistic practice. Scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners will interrogate structures of medicalization and institutionalization, engaging in dialogue about the entanglement of psy-disciplines with colonial and nation-building projects predicated on scientific racism, misogyny, xenophobia, transphobia, and eugenics. We ask how structural violence has both created maddening conditions and established the terms by which survivors are pathologized, criminalized and alienated.
Among the questions we want to explore are those posed by conference panelist Camille Robcis in her intellectual history of institutional psychotherapy, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (2021), specifically how movements that have attempted to decolonize and otherwise contest the practices of psychiatry can provide us with frameworks to understand our own positioning vis-à-vis “the permanence of extreme-right movements, fascisms real and ‘in our heads,’ still spreading and gaining force throughout the world.” We take inspiration as well from our Fall 2021 event with La Marr Jurelle Bruce, whose critical discourse about madness encompasses unruliness, radical creativity, and rage in the face of systems that have used the concept of Blackness as disability to foreclose the possibilities of Black freedom. Our conference dialogues will also engage calls for intersectional approaches to abolition and decarceralization address disability and madness, and the imperative to center the experiences of indigenous and Palestinian people resisting psychic oppression while living under occupation.
The impetus for this conference comes as we collectively persist while a virus has exposed structural violence and inadequacy of profit-based systems of care, and we are also confronted with increased ecological fragility. We are now understandably asking questions about the shakiness of human experience, and how to reckon with what might be called “unlivable states of mind.” War, ecological destruction, land dispossession, occupation and policing, precarious access to shelter, and confinement in a total institution are among the conditions that are maddening, and yet upheld by powerful schemas that place value on profit, property, and hierarchy over collective wellbeing.
Gathering together, we explore potential modes of healing. Like seeds we plant without knowing which will root, we pursue collectivity and creativity in order to keep living.
Accessibility
Live transcription and ASL interpretation will be provided. Please email any additional access needs to skreitzb@barnard.edu.
This event is free and open to all.
Image Detail
Tsoku Maela, “A Brief Reminder of Solitude” (2020)