What Is Madness?

What Is Madness? is an artistic, scientific and technological investigation into the relations between mental health, conditions of existence and structures of power. It starts from the hypothesis that psychological suffering cannot be understood only as an individual phenomenon, separate from the social, political, economic, historical and environmental conditions in which life takes place.

Human experience is crossed by forces we cannot always perceive directly: violence, hunger, war, precarity, racism, exclusion, isolation, climate change and material insecurity. These conditions do not only organise society. They also run through bodies, nervous systems, processes of adaptation and the possibilities of existing.

By bringing together environmental and social data, neuroscience, biochemistry, image, light and sound, the project seeks to make some of these relations perceptible. Science provides instruments to observe what escapes immediate experience; art creates other ways to experience, interpret and question these phenomena.

The research also turns to the history of psychiatry and to the practices of confinement that turned certain differences, behaviours and forms of suffering into grounds for exclusion. In dialogue with the anti-asylum movement, the Brazilian Psychiatric Reform and decolonial thought, the project asks who has the power to define normality, which lives are considered legitimate and which historical conditions make certain populations more vulnerable to suffering and to institutional violence.