Contesting Madness is composed and built around four filmic chapters: The Animal, The Water, The Jungle, and The Nightmare. The installation comprises a sculptural structure that resembles human body parts, video works, paintings and objects. Inside the bodily structure, a universe unfolds with video screens, props from the filmic material and intervened everyday life objects such as wigs, mannequins (limbs), sleeping bags turned into snakes, fences with viscous liquids dripping, spider webs and clothing. In the films I stage performative responses to texts and enunciations with the participation of guests and myself. I layer sound, symbols and hybrid imagined characters that I extracted from conversations I staged around perceptions of madness and magic with different people in Rotterdam.
These conversations in combination with theory, led me to address the impact of coloniality and diasporic movement over perceptions of sanity; a return to nature and animality that contest modernity’s dichotomies between human and nature, body and mind; the systemic violence of institutional bio-politics inflicted on ethnic minorities, impoverished communities, women and sexual dissidents; and the capacity of the body to speak beyond language and exist beyond legibility, while finding itself limited and/or invited to access secret knowledge.
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