Mad Memory Project performances bring people into relation with mad people, histories, and cultures. Blending historical research and embodied practice, we join together in acts of mad kinmaking, generating intergenerational intimacies and ancestral lineages that stretch across time. Our engagements take many forms. We dance in the shade of former asylums, tilting and gliding past their pristine shopping plaza façades. We generate collaborative soundscapes, creating musical scores that speculate beyond the limits of the case file. We compose gestures of remembrance at unmarked state hospital cemeteries, offering our bodily motion as a belated memorial to the unnamed dead. Taken together, these performance manifest a once-unimaginable future, one in which mad communities do not disappear but, rather, multiply.

What is your personal relationship to madness? Who are your mad ancestors?

How does your body respond to these questions?


What is madness?

Our use of the terms “mad” and “madness” throughout this project stems from mad pride, radical mental health, and disability justice activists who critique the depoliticizing nature of psychiatric paradigms. To be sure, such paradigms can be useful for accessing needed resources and support; and yet, there are many aspects of mental, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral differences that escape medical discourse. When reclaimed by those with lived experiences, the terms “mad” and “madness” serve as an invitation to imagine these differences otherwise, to turn away from notions of individual psychiatric diagnoses and towards shared social experiences. In this turn, other possibilities emerge: madness as social identity, as minoritarian constituency, as intergenerational community, as ancestral lineage, as expressive culture, as chosen family, as kin.

What is mad kinmaking?

In response to these vibrant possibilities, Mad Memory Project performances invite both mad and non-mad participants to deepen their own relationships to madness, forging connections with mad communities across time—a creative genealogical practice we describe as mad kinmaking.

As a relational framework, kinship offers mad people the opportunity to coalesce around shared histories—and to place themselves in relation to those histories. At the same time, as numerous Indigenous, queer, and disabled activists observe, kinship does not require sameness; rather, kinship offers a relational framework for thinking both through and in excess of identity, cultivating affinities across multiple intersections and differences. The term “kinmaking” places this relational framework in a creative key: kin is not given but, rather, made. When joined to “mad,” kinmaking expands these affinities beyond the bounds of madness proper, extending solidarity to those who might not identify as mad but whose lives emerge in relation to madness nonetheless: descendants of (often erased) mad ancestors, family to mad loved ones (biological and chosen), non-mad disabled people, Black and other negatively-racialized people targeted by scientific racism, Indigenous nations and communities dispossessed by settler-colonial psychiatry, queer and trans people pathologized by diagnostic regimes, women labeled “crazy,” “hysterical,” “insane,”—and so many others. These, too, are relations. These, too, are mad kin.

In honoring these disparate kinships, the Mad Memory Project ultimately insists on the disruptive potential of mad perspectives—perspectives that, when informed by broad intersectional analysis—are vital to building a more equitable and just world for us all.