Contesting Madness is an installation consisting of four filmic chapters: The Animal, The Water, The Jungle, and The Nightmare. The work features a sculptural structure resembling human body parts, alongside video works, paintings, and objects. Inside the structure, a universe unfolds with video screens, props, mannequins, sleeping bags turned into snakes, fences with dripping liquids, and other transformed everyday objects. Performative responses to texts are staged with various participants, layering sound, symbols, and hybrid characters extracted from conversations around pereived notions of madness and magic. The installation itself blends sculptural and filmic elements, transforming everyday objects to challenge perceptions of identity, sanity, and knowledge.
The work and films examine the impact of coloniality and diasporic movement on perceptions of sanity, challenging modernity’s dichotomies between human and nature, body and mind, and reason and intuition. It critiques the systemic violence of institutional bio-politics inflicted on ethnic minorities, impoverished communities, women, and sexual dissidents. Additionally, it investigates the body’s capacity to communicate beyond language and exist beyond legibility, even as it navigates society’s demand to transparency and graspability.
The project is based on conversations with various guests based in Rotterdam, amongst them: RAM Supermarket operator (anonymous), Merel Hooijer, Virgil Zaalman, Floortje Meijer, Esdra Baris, Winti healer (anonymous), Lianne Rueb and Vanita and Johanna Monk.
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