how do we get to be left in peace?
castillo y fátima masoud salazar
Our project is an experimental and collaborative research on processes to make a film on Mad Pride internationally. The research is part of our experiences devising processes to carry out arts, and transfagbidyke and queer community health projects. Such processes make use of chosen-mixt, intimate, and self-organized assemblies as a tool for reflection, governance, and production.
mad pride
Mad Pride is an activist movement formed by people who self-identify as mad, psychiatrized, survivors and users of psychiatry, users of mental healthcare, mentally ill, neurodivergent, autistic, voice-hearers, people with experiences of psychic distress… who lead their own struggle as political subjects. Mad Pride fights for a paradigm shift in “mental health” opposing the pathologization and punishment of madness. It demands the end of all sorts of psychiatric violence. It wants to end with the biopsychosocial model, which pathologizes the consequences and pains of the living conditions resulting from capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal systems.
Mad Pride began in 1993 in Canada when the first “Psychiatric Survivor Pride Day” was held. This demonstration was held to denounce the oppressions experienced by psychiatrized people in a certain area of Toronto. Soon after, Mad Pride was started in the United Kingdom. By the end of the 1990s there were Mad Pride groups in Australia, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Madagascar, Portugal, South Africa, and the USA. Soon after other groups were formed in Korea and Spain.
The activist movement Mad Pride is connected with the scholarly area of Mad Studies. Mad Studies includes reflections on madness, critical histories of psychiatric treatments and confinement, intersectional studies, and activism.
At La Escocesa, working between us two and with the rest of the participants in a chosen-mixt (people with experiences of psychic distress and/or psychiatrization), intimate, and self-organized assembly, we will attempt answering to the following questions: How can the making of a film on Mad Pride serve to build mad networks of safety, struggle, and creation? And how do our working processes protect us from assimilationism and tokenism within arts and scholarly institutions?
our research processes
This project is part of our experiences devising processes to carry out transfagbidyke, arts, and community health projects in the framework of an experimental and collaborative arts research project that Castillo initiated in 2020. The research project departs from a desire to assemble in chosen-mixity, intimately, and in self-organization between transfagbidyke artists and activists to live and practise in the wake of the covid epidemic outbreak. To decide upon our identities, our relationships with scholarly and arts institutions, and our governance. To oppose healthism, using harm reduction political paradigms and connecting with our transfagbidyke lineage of community health. Between 2020 and 2022, we held several assemblies around the questions: What governance for assemblies of transfagbidyke artists and activists in the wake of the covid epidemic outbreak? And what processes we choose to transmit transfagbidyke knowledges?
With the experiences gathered, we are concentrating now in devising processes to carry out arts, and transfagbidyke and queer community health projects. We make use of chosen-mixt, intimate, and self-organized assemblies as a tool for exchange and governance. We challenge traditions of expertise and ownership with chosen-mixity, visibility with intimacy, and hierarchy and authorship with self-organization.
related activities
how to get to be left in peace?
Thursday 18 May 2023
How do we get to be left in peace? is the party that resulted from a series of internal meetings that took place as part of this research project and in chosen, intimate and self-managed mixture during 2022 in La Escocesa. This public meeting aims to present some of the experiences that took place, the collective Nebunchalá, the film project about the international Mad Pride movement and two performances by Medusa and Marikarmen Free.
Read all the information here
about the artists
castillo
Is an artist and arts researcher dedicated to collaborating in transfagbidyke processes for artistic creation. Since 2020, he leads a multiyear experimental and collaborative research project on transfagbidyke assemblies, arts, and community health. The research project is made in partnership with institutions Argos, art-recherche, BUDA Kunstcentrum, erg: école de recherche graphique, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Fonds de Recherche en Art, Flanders State of the Art, Jester and Kaaitheater in Belgium, and Azala, La Escocesa and MACBA in Spain. Castillo is co-founder of the queer arts initiative Buenos Tiempos, Int. He was born in Castilla-La Mancha and lives in Brussels.
fátima masoud salazar
Lives in Madrid and is an artist, a researcher and a queer, antiracist and “mental health” activist, as well as one of the founders of Orgullo Loco (Mad Pride) Madrid. She has participated in organizing the Mad Pride demonstration in Madrid every year since 2018. She is in charge of the online and social media content creation for Mad Pride and creator in the project Locas por los Libros (Mad About Books). She has written on psychiatrization and on Mad Pride for numerous publications: El rumor de las multitudes, El Salto, Viento Sur, Ekintza Zuzena, Madrid en Acción… Among other venues, she has delivered conferences at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Complutense University in Madrid), Asociación Lisístrata, Partido Comunista de España (Spanish Communist Party), Universidad de Verano de Anticapitalistas (Anticapitalist Summer University), Fundación de los Comunes, and Traficantes de Sueños. She has participated in the presentations of various books: La loca de la puerta de al lado by Alda Merini and Apuntes para una psiquiatría destructiva by Alfredo Aracil. She obtained a master’s degree for Universidad de Barcelona (University of Barcelona) with a thesis on a gender analysis on treatments for addictions. She researches, writes, paints, and keeps on surviving the psychiatric system.
Photo credit: Banner including stickers of Mad Pride London, and the collective organizing that same demonstration, Campaign for Psych Abolition. The photograph was taken by Fátima Masoud Salazar during Mad Pride London in July 2022.
This project continues the collaborative and experimental research on transfagbidyke assemblies, arts, and community health carried out by Castillo since 2020 with the collaboration of Azala in Lasierra, erg: école de recherche graphique and Kaaitheater in Brussels, and MACBA in Barcelona, and with the support of Fonds de Recherche en Art (FRArt)-Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique in Belgium.
